Bee Season

Starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, and Flora Cross. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 18, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

It's a lot to ask of a sensitive 11-year-old to become a spelling-bee champion and also to "reach the ear of God" somewhere in-between homework, dinner, and bedtime. The amber-lit and weighty Bee Season reaches for not only a mystical hookup with divinity but also pries the shingled roof off one of those handsome Craftsman houses in Oakland, California, to spell out the ugly secrets lurking within a perfectly presentable family of four. As adapted by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (mother of those Gyllenhaal siblings) from the haunting novel by Myla Goldberg, Bee Season homes in on the Naumann family. They live amid intellectual clutter and dinners prepared to the strains of classical music, as befits a UC Berkeley Cabala prof, Saul (Richard Gere), his formerly Catholic scientist wife, Miriam (Juliette Binoche), their teenage son, Aaron (Max Minghella), and daughter Eliza (Flora Cross). While Miriam habitually, mysteriously arrives home late, Saul showboats in the kitchen, then holes up in his study with pride-and-joy Aaron for violin-and-cello duets, ignoring Eliza, who hasn't yet proven herself a shining reflection of her parents' gene merge.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End, Suture)-adept at coolly crafting secretive families and submerged emotions, crises, and crime-portentously tap on the safety glass around the Naumanns when Eliza wins her school spelling bee. Climbing toward the national championship, she attracts her father's narcissistic religious aspirations: Saul becomes convinced that Eliza's uncanny spelling ability could become a conduit to God. Castoff Aaron seeks enlightenment in a form guaranteed to piss off his father, and Miriam reveals a disturbing penchant.

Gere's swaggering screen persona is a natural fit for a man whose peacock-bully strutting over his family's accomplishments is more about him than about them, a man who ignores his wife's obvious double life until he realizes too late that he needs her to complete the picture he's constructed. Gere is charismatic, but as a questing Jewish scholar with a pressing intellect, he's stretching plausibility. Binoche moves us as the dreamy-sad Miriam, yet the character is so underwritten that even when we see the bizarre manifestation of her attempt to "gather the shards and fix what's been broken", there's an unmendable disconnect. Grave-eyed Flora Cross is the picture's mesmerizing, soulful centre, and she even pulls off a potentially laughable scene.

The music swells with mystical possibility, and painterly tableaux alternate false warmth with chill. There are visual metaphors and magic-realism effects that are sometimes amusing and arresting, sometimes tiresome. Bee Season's exploration of spirituality and disaffected family tries admirably to transcend, but though we get in under the Naumann's roof, we can't quite break the ice. Thankfully, there are no red-braceletted, Cabala heat-seekers in sight.

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