Bee Season a Bad Spelling Lesson

As I was exiting Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s new movie “Bee Season” a woman asked me if I liked the picture. After a slight grimace and a too-long uncomfortable silence she then asked if I had ever read Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel on which it was based. Shaking my head no, this nattily dressed woman stated simply, “Well, it’s much better if you’ve read the book. You’d like it a lot if you’d read it.”

Now, maybe it is just me but, while I can fully accept the possibility a good movie can be made richer, maybe even better, from a person having read the source material, no cinematic interpretation should ever go from being awful to wonderful just because you’re read the book. A good literary adaptation, like say this weekend’s “Walk the Line” or “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” should be entertaining for everyone regardless of their reading skills. “Bee Season” is schmaltzy, glossy, thin, esoteric crap, and for the life of me I can’t fathom that opinion changing just because I took the time to go over a few pages of Goldberg’s prose.

What’s most distressing is that this should have been wonderful. The screenplay is by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal whose script for “Running on Empty” is easily one of my all-time favs. Directors McGehee and Siegel aren’t slouches themselves, “The Deep End” one of the most sublime and wonderfully creepy entertainments I saw back in 2001. Tapping it all off, the documentary “Spellbound” proved watching little kids spelling unpronounceable five-syllable words makes for great entertainment, so the idea of dropping an exceptionally talented sixth grader speller into a complex familial drama isn’t even remotely bad.

But no matter how you spell it, “Bee Season” stinks. Richard Gere (“Shall We Dance”) showboats his way through things as a college religious studies professor. Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient”) looks embarrassed at having to walk from scene to scene like a ghost trapped behind a fog of disassociated grief. Max Minghella (“Syriana”) and Kate Bosworth (“Beyond the Sea”) are ensnared in a Hare Krishna subplot so silly I kept waiting for the two of them to breakout in giggling fits of laughter. The whole thing is so astonishing terrible my compatriot for the evening and I spent the majority of the feature looking at one another in dumbfounded disbelief.

There are some moments here and there that actually do come perilously close to working. Diminutive newcomer Flora Cross plays the movie’s heroine, spelling champion Eliza Naumann, with surprisingly subtle grace, and she shares one or two priceless moments with her mother (Binoche) that are halfway decent. I also liked the way the directors explore her almost magical abilities visually, the digital trickery bringing her brainy skills to life extremely well done and highly original.

It’s just all so banal and boring, though, with much of it bordering on the absurd. Foner Gyllenhaal’s script tries to have the best of both worlds, doing its best to keep Eliza’s gift mystical and yet also trying to be concretely literal when embracing the Kabbalah mysticism in which her father (Gere) professes to believe. Worse, the characters themselves never engender our sympathies, each of them (save Eliza) changing personalities so frequently a person almost needs footnotes to track all of them. McGehee and Siegel appear powerless to shape any of this into a package that’s remotely interesting (let alone entertaining), and despite their best visual efforts (Giles Nuttgens’ photography is fantastic) nothing changes the fact that they leave their actors stranded with absolutely nothing to do.

Please, don’t take any of this as a denunciation of the film’s central exploration of Kabbalah. If anything, based on the small sliver of info here a movie revolving around the religion might be fairly interesting. But “Bee Season” is just an excruciating, unfocused mess of a picture, and even my usual contempt for New Age trickery can’t be seen as an excuse for my hating this as much as I do. A bad movie is a bad movie no matter how you slice it, and the facts proving that here are as crystal clear as any possibly could get.

No, “Bee Season” is just plain awful. That’s right, awful, A-W-F-U-L, awful, and if that doesn’t spell out my feelings succinctly I don’t know what will.