>>REVIEW
BEE SEASON
STARRING Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche
DIRECTED BY Scott McGehee and David Siegel
Opens Friday, November 25
Check Listings
Sixth grader Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) has a gift for dissecting the alphabet. When we first catch up with Eliza in Bee Season, she has just won her school’s spelling bee and is obviously moving on to bigger, better competition. The sad irony is, for someone so talented with words, she’s stuck in an upper-class Jewish family that sucks at communication.
There’s Eliza’s Kabbalah-obsessed academic father Saul (Richard Gere), kleptomaniac mother Miriam (Juliette Binoche) and older brother Aaron (Max Minghella), who, right around the time dad starts to actually take an interest in his daughter’s talent, rebels by ditching Judaism for the Hare Krishnas. With a pretty blond disciple like Kate Bosworth doing the sales job, what sane guy wouldn’t be tempted to sign up?
Each character is grasping for some kind of serenity, a reassuring spiritual peace, but the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End) never seem to provide any shred of resolution for them or us. At least, nothing that satisfies.
The film does have an agenda though, one rooted in the secrets of Kabbalah – and that’s a distraction for a concept that, after the success of the spelling bee documentary Spellbound, had such promise.
Gere, playing an emotionally cold brainiac, is quite good. And Cross, who was only 11 years old when Bee Season was made, is a natural – a perfect blend of cutesy charm and poignant seriousness. Unfortunately, both performances take a hit by the odd storyline that has Eliza using not her intellectual flair to spell, but her mystic abilities. Watching her pluck ’n’ place letters floating about in odd places is sort of like watching Sesame Street on acid.
Oh, Eliza's magical style makes for some cool visual tricks by McGehee and Siegel, sure. But not exactly the kind of stuff that’ll have audiences making a beeline to catch this one. |
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