DVD | Bee Season

Rating: M - Contains Offensive Language.
Duration: 104 mins.
Genre : Drama.
Actors: Kate Bosworth, Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Max Minghella, Flora Cross.
Release Date: Available now.

Bee Season is an intriguing movie – more a retrospective piece than an entertaining story. It’s also totally misleading in its intentions. Wrapped up in a story of a gifted girl who is trying to please her overbearing father is a story of religious totalitarianism.

Now you’re gonna have to excuse me as I’m pretty much going to cover the main themes and conclusions of the movie, and may or may not spoil the movie if you haven’t seen it yet. You have been warned!

The father (Richard Gere) is a Kabbalistic figurehead, a Jewish teacher whose thesis looked at the Jewish Mystical theory of Tikkun Olam – a theory that believes that the universe is broken – fractured into many pieces – and it’s through our good works that we can bring it back together. His thesis also looked into the power of words and a specific way through words to be able to come into a tangible presence with God. Unfortunately the father could never achieve his own spiritual nirvana and sees in his gifted daughter a vessel of achieve his mystical dreams.

But it’s not just his daughter who he’s using for his own gain – his theories have given his wife such false hope of bringing her dead parents back, that she’s become a kleptomaniac, sneaking into peoples houses and stealing shiny knick-knacks and hanging them in her rented storage place in an effort to archive pure light – and presumably bring back her parents.

The son, who was boy wonder until his younger sister’s gift was exposed, has been relegated from his fathers love, and seeks spiritual nourishment through a chance encounter with a Hare Krishna girl. After finding nothing in his fathers failed religion he finds comfort, but this only leads to stress within the family.

When the mother gets arrested and put into a mental hospital just before the Spelling Bee Nationals, the dysfunctional family is pushed to the limits. During the final, the daughter realises her role in Tikkun Olam is to fail, in an attempt to bring order back into the universe and to her family.

This is a very fragmented movie, which is both confusing and applicable – the movie wants us to believe that we are all fractured individuals in a fractured universe, and that we can all achieve our own http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gifnirvana if we can only put the pieces together again.

It’s not the most entertaining of movies, as I’ve said, it’s fractured and confusing – the pace is at times ponderous, and the only real moments of tension are predictable and infrequent. The best part of the entire movie is how the visual representation of seeing words is portrayed through the mind of the daughter – this is sheer genius – but it’s a little to late to save the movie.

Food for thought
One of the themes of the movie is the power of words – that you can see the entire universe through words. Do words really have such power?