The Secret Life Of Bees

[October 15th, 2008]

In case you are pondering whether to take your children—or, bless your sweet little heart, yourself—to see The Secret Life of Bees, it seems helpful to clarify up front that this is the Southern-set Dakota Fanning movie in which Dakota Fanning does not get raped. (That would be Hounddog—which, in a small mercy, is not playing in Portland.) Not that Fanning doesn’t suffer in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s treatment of Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller. Dakota Fanning always suffers. Torment is, so far as I can tell, the real secret to Fanning’s continued employment in motion pictures. A child actress with an eerie knack for weeping, screaming and trembling, she serves as a kind of masochistic scapegoat for audiences that cannot be troubled by adult emotions. Kidnapped by Mexicans in Man on Fire, menaced by gooey aliens in War of the Worlds, she breaks out her trademark poses—rigid, wide-eyed panic, broken by wails of helpless rage—and the popcorn-chewers are relieved of the burden of critical thinking. In The Secret Life of Bees, Fanning is pitted against noxious South Carolina racists, as well as her own father (Paul Bettany, doing everything to scream “redneck” short of knocking out his own teeth), who forces her to kneel bare-kneed in a pile of uncooked grits as punishment for sneaking out to look at pictures of her dead mother. At this rate, Fanning should call Child Protective Services whenever she is approached by a director (or a box of Cream of Wheat).

Instead, she go on the run with Jennifer Hudson: In a gender-reversed Huckleberry Finn update, the two flee segregationists and abusive Pa Bettany until they reach the candy-colored home of Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys, who raise honeybees and hold sitting-parlor worship services that are a blend of Marian cult and the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. To consent to what follows, a certain steely obliviousness is required. It is best not to ask why such mighty maternal figures rely on a tacky wooden idol to give them strength, or to question whether people who sell honey for a living might eventually grow tired of eating honey-glazed baked goods. In fact, The Secret Life of Bees works best if you don’t think of it as a movie at all but as an object lesson to which your kids can take their racist white grandmother, whom they cannot disown. It will help if she likes honey, or magic. PG-13.