Bee Season
Reviewed by Gordon Kearns
Please be warned: This review reveals key plot elements (SPOILERS).
The following is the conclusion of the lecture being given by Saul Naumann, a professor of religious studies at U.C. Berkeley, early in the movie:
"So, a paradox. God is everything, a perfect luminous essence. But even God wants more - to experience more, to give. So God creates a vessel, a container that can receive this gift of God's pure light. His divine light pours into the vessel. The vessel, of course, can't contain the magnitude of this light, and it shatters. Destroying the vessel, and scattering its broken shards in a big bang of creation. Now man's job is to locate and gather these shards to make the vessel - our world - whole again. Now the Cabbalists call this fixing, this mending - they call it, 'Tikkun olam,' the fixing of the world. Now any act of goodness, altruism, kindness that contributes to that idea is considered tikkun olam. It's an extraordinary idea - that we can restore what has been shattered. In fact, it's our responsibility to try, each of us. Out of the very pieces of the destruction God has left us hope."
Thus, the thesis of the story is established, and acts as the reference point for every important plot turn to come.
Essentially, the family is the vessel, seemingly ideal under the leadership of the father, Saul. The nature of the family is clearly laid out in the first scene of them together in the kitchen of the family's home. The father dominates; he controls the dialog and establishes his authority through his professorial expertise and manner. Aaron, the teenaged son, obviously has a close and loving feeling for his eleven year old sister, Eliza - Elly. The mother, Miriam, plays a subordinate role in the family hierarchy, but in this scene she does show she has a motherly protective attitude for her son (she has already demonstrated that attitude for Elly: in the car she said she would call the girl after school, apparently a routine daily check. She also apparently routinely tucks Elly in bed at night). However, it's obvious Aaron is firmly ensconced as his father's devoted protegee. Saul and Miriam seem to have an easy give-and-take relationship. Elly is obviously out of the loop in the apparently smoothly functioning family dynamic. She contributes little, if anything, of note to the ensemble's intra-actions. Saul hardly takes notice of her presence in the scene. Earlier, she didn't feel close enough to her father to personally hand him the principal's letter with the news of her winning the school spelling bee. Fact is, she didn't even take the initiative of knocking on his office door, choosing to slip the letter under the door. In sum: Saul is sated by dispensing his wisdom and power-guiding his son; Aaron is tight with his father, enjoying the attention of father-son confidential and exclusive camaraderie; Miriam, while her son is basically under control of his father, is able to provide her undemanding daughter with routine warm motherly love; and Elly, not in the mainstream of the family dynamic, gets along fine in a world of her own - in effect, she exists independent of the circle of needs.
Elly is the "gift of God's pure light." She is child innocent. She is unassuming. She is guileless. She trusts her father and mother and loves her brother. She is modest, but independent of thought and, as we will discover as the story unfolds, strong of spirit - and keenly observant of the people in her life. And loving: she's the only family member who accepts each of the others on their own terms; she's the only one devoted to the family itself; and later, as the story progresses, she's the only one perceptive and sensitive enough to see and grasp the significance of the evolving turmoil each of the others is experiencing. However, no one in the family recognizes her beauty and purity of heart; for them, she's just there. And then . . . she wins the district spelling bee. "God's gift of light" has manifested itself and can no longer be ignored. But the vessel that is the family can't contain the magnitude of her light, and it shatters. The happy-family normalcy was so delicately balanced that it couldn't sustain the added pressure.
Aaron is lost. His religious base was shaky from the start, depending as it did on Saul's intellectual pedantry. And his life under Saul's wing has left him unable to cope on his own. When Saul turns his full attention to helping Elly refine her spelling talents, Aaron feels deserted. Now that he doesn't have his father's hand on his shoulders, his shaky religious underpinnings surface. Still needing the security his intellectually overpowering father provided, he starts reaching out, seeking a new, firmer religious philosophy of his own. He is unsuccessful until he meets the beautiful Chali, a personality every bit as strong as his father. She is solidly rooted in the religion of her choice, Hare Krishna; and in her warm attentions Aaron finds a happier security than he lost when Saul dropped him.
Unknown to Saul, Miriam had always teetered on the brink of a mental breakdown, apparently stemming from the childhood trauma of losing both her parents in an automobile accident. Saul's story of tikkun olam, which he brought into the afterglow of their lovemaking, appealed to her; and she has since been on a personal quest to bring the shards of her broken childhood back together . . . literally. She invades private homes stealing trinkets and prisms and jewelry that to her represent the scattered shards of her life. With Saul now preempting her role as attentive parent to Elly, she has nothing from her normal life to hang her sanity on, and her stealing suddenly gains a new and reckless impetus.
The vessel has shattered. But Saul sees not, because he looks not. In working with Elly he has sensed in her introspective system of spelling words a gift for the mysticism of the Jewish Kabbalah, in which he has devoted almost obsessive study. In her he might vicariously reach true mystical shefa, a trance-like state described by the Hebrew mystic Abraham Abulafia, a trance-like state he'd never been able to achieve for himself. In this state a person is in direct communion with God - not only is one able to talk to God, but sometimes have God talk back. Saul's most tragic flaw is the inability to understand, or even notice, the human dynamic of the people he's closest to. He is a personality totally self-immersed. Not only does he not see the shattering of his family, but he doesn't consider the danger he is exposing his child to by teaching her how to achieve shefa.
But from the beginning, Elly has seen the dissolution of her beloved family piece by piece. And she is child-honest and wise enough to realize the source. Twice in the course of the story she verbalized the realization that it was her spelling that started the problems. When the family situation finally reaches its most dramatic climax, with Miriam in a mental hospital, and Aaron and Saul at each other's throats, Elly takes it upon herself to make a personal appeal to God for help through the only means at her disposal, shefa. She'd never gone this far in working with her father, and she realizes the danger; but her devotion to her family is unflagging.
The awesome experience leaves her stunned. However, nothing seems changed from the way it was before. Except her. As she progresses through the finals of the National Spelling Bee, the hand of divine intervention is nowhere apparent. In the end she realizes that fixing what has been broken is in her hands. Maybe this realization derived from Heavenly inspiration while in shefa; or maybe the terror-filled journey to hades and back has given her the necessary confidence. In any case, when she's given the championship word, Origami, a word she correctly spelled for her father the night before, she suddenly realizes the way to saving her family is by putting an end to Saul's obsession with her spelling, by putting an end to the roller-coaster ride. It's not only necessary for her to lose, but Saul has to realize it was deliberate - on a word she knows he knows she can spell. At the same time she's delivering a message to her brother standing at the back of the auditorium, and her mother watching on TV, that the family can be whole again. Hers is an act of extreme altruism reminding of Saul's lecture defining altruism as one of the means of tikkun olam - fixing the world. Whether or not the shards will or can be brought back together, at least now there is hope.
Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, and Max Minghella each did an excellent job bringing to life the flawed and fragile characters they portrayed, while maintaining a dignity that earned the audience's respect for that character. These were not bad people. In fact, the most disturbing aspect of this family was that we could see ourselves in the way they dealt with their challenges. Of Flora Cross, who played Eliza, I was floored by the depth she brought to her role. Her ability to communicate her deepest thoughts and feelings with the least obvious signals was extraordinary. Certainly, Flora's shefa scene demanded the same kind of intensity as such classic sequences as Patty Duke's "Water" scene in 1962's The Miracle Worker and Jena Malone's rape scene 1996's Bastard out of Carolina.
Bee Season was based on the novel of the same name by Myla Goldberg, and written for the screen by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal. It was directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.
or go to
An Explanation; Being Things; Childhood; Heroes; The Inner Spirit;
Elves I Have Known
Other Essays at Large: Movie Classics; Class of the Millennium;
My Book Reviews; My Stories
From Dorothy's Corner: For Dorothy
Comments: GKEARNS@prodigy.net