At The Movies: Bee Season

The family saga "Bee Season" has plenty of honey for the brain but little for the heart.

Adapted from Myla Goldberg's novel, this intellectually overstuffed drama is strangled by its literary roots, the characters coming off as facades whose dark, strange actions often feel pointless because we have no true glimpse of their inner lives.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel took on a similarly dark literary adaptation about domestic crises with far greater success on 2001's thriller "The Deep End." That film also was undercut by an emotional dryness but was buoyed by a tremendous performance by Tilda Swinton as a mother going to extremes to protect her family.

"Bee Season" has sturdy performances from Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Max Minghella and newcomer Flora Cross as a sixth-grader whose phenomenal success at spelling bees proves a catalyst for friction in her family.

Yet "Bee Season" is so dour and low-key, it's difficult to care about the characters or their crises. The screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal lacks the passion that infused her earlier scripts, "Running on Empty" and "Losing Isaiah."

"Bee Season" centers on the Naumann family, a cozy, rather cold clan where everybody knows their place. The dad, Saul (Gere), runs the roost with a kind but firm my-way's-the-best-way attitude.

A professor who specializes in the mysticism of the Kabbalah, Saul devotes much of his free time to raising teen son Aaron (Minghella) in his image, overseeing the youth's religious studies and sharing violin and cello duets with the boy.

The mom, Miriam (Binoche), is a research scientist passively willing to let her husband dominate the home life while she wanders off on mysterious quests for trinkets, a search somehow linked to the parents' deaths in a car wreck when she was a child.

Daughter Eliza (Cross) feels like wallpaper, always there but not really noticed by her parents, especially Saul. Yet after Eliza begins a surprising run of victories in regional spelling bees, the dynamic switches; Aaron becomes the overlooked son as Saul obsesses on his daughter, sensing the hand of God in her talent.

The balance is turned upside-down in the Naumann home, Aaron retaliating through dalliances with other faiths, settling in with a Hare Krishna group through the influence of a beautiful devotee (Kate Bosworth, in a fleeting, undernourished role).

Meantime, Miriam's desperate cries for help go unnoticed by her husband amid his fixation on Eliza, as the family troubles slowly build to crisis level.

What drives these people? Lunacy for lunacy's sake, rebellion for rebellion's sake, egghead autocracy for egghead autocracy's sake?

The film never offers satisfying answers, only vague hints of the characters' motivations and inner turmoil.

The most interesting sequences in "Bee Season" are the cleverly designed visuals revealing Eliza's trancelike states as she summons up correct word spellings, fanciful moments reminiscent of the special-effects number-crunching that went on in the head of the boy math genius in Jodie Foster's "Little Man Tate."

Eliza's hallucinatory manifestations are the only real looks inside any of the characters. It's a bad sign when the optical gimmicks overshadow the human drama in a character-driven story.

"Bee Season," a Fox Searchlight release, is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, a scene of sensuality and brief strong language. Running time: 104 minutes. Two stars out of four.