Review: The Secret Life of Bees

[Originally published in the Forge Press 05.12.08]

Put a Sting in Your Step

Review: The Secret Life of Bees

Every once in a while, Hollywood puts the superheroes, ditzy rom-coms and talking animal movies aside, and gets its claws around something with a little more substance. In 2008, a good contender for this crown is Gina Prince-Bythewood’s ‘The Secret Life of Bees’. Based on Susan Monk Kidd’s New York Times bestseller, the film is a heart-warming story of the relationships between women, but is a tale with a sting.

Set against the racial tension of the Deep South in the sixties, The Secret Life of Bees follows the life of Lily Owens, played by wunderkind Dakota Fanning. The tone is set from the opening scene where four year old Lily accidentally kills her mother. This is not a world inhabited by happy people.

Time jolts forwards a decade to find Lily living with her father and their black maid Rosaleen, played by Jennifer Hudson. Lily’s fourteenth birthday coincides with the passing of the Civil Rights act, a day with disastrous outcomes for both Lily and Rosaleen. The two run away, in search of the truth about Lily’s mother, and find themselves at the bright pink home of three black beekeeping sisters.

This is a film that focuses on the subtleties of people’s emotions and the small events that affect us the most deeply. The shock of the secretary who hears Lily is living alone with black women speaks volumes. This theme finds solidity in the ‘wailing wall’ built by Queen Latifah’s matriarchal character, August, and filled with tiny pencil notes scribbled by Sophie Okonedo’s cripplingly sensitive May.

Fanning gives a performance beyond her early teenage years in its sensitivity and understanding. Lily’s innocence sometimes verges on stupidity as she is annoyingly naïve about racism. She’s wide-eyed in disbelief when a shopkeeper refuses to allow Rosaleen into his shop, leaving Rosaleen cowering against a wall. Surely she’d noticed before that not many people where she lives like black people very much?

Paul Bettany elicits a sympathetic performance as Lily’s domineering father. The short scenes of him alone give real insight into a character that has twice been abandoned by the women in his life. Despite his aggressive actions by the end of the film it’s impossible not to pity the man who is returning to his empty home.

And while Alicia Keys is not the greatest actress her coldness works well as the hardened but musically gifted June. She is the antithesis of the male white racists in the film; the black female activist whose suppressed anger and frustrations are taken out on her boyfriend and with silent venom against Lily.

While it is an obvious comparison to draw, the film does have added resonance in light of Obama’s election. It makes the achievement all the more remarkable to realise it has only been in Obama’s own lifetime that America’s black population have had the right to vote. ‘The Secret Life of Bees’ may not make it amongst the all time greats, but it’s certainly thought provoking in these changing times.

Kimberley Long