The 'Long Hot Summer' moves to never-never land

The Secret Life of Bees has a fine cast and strong atmosphere but its story never quite goes anywhere. Dakota Fanning is a 14-year-old white girl in 1964 rural South Carolina. She runs away from her abusive father (Paul Bettany) with his black housekeeper (Jennifer Hudson) and joins an all-woman black household led by Queen Latifah, who has a big house painted dark pink and 28 acres inherited from her grandmother and raises bees and bottles honey with a black Madonna on the labels.

Each of three sisters has the name of a summer month and each is a distinctive character. Queen Latifah is August Boatwright and she's--well--Queen Latifah--a tower of serenity and warmth. So is Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), the runaway housekeeper, but she's shaken up, having been beaten by racists for trying to vote and taken by the girl on the flight to the honey farm to escape police custody. June (Alicia Keys) is a severe young woman, a cellist and music teacher constantly pursued by another teacher, Nell (Nate Parker), whom she flirts with but steadfastly refuses to marry. May (Sophie Okonedo) is a strange creature plagued by sorrows since the death of a twin; a mere thought of sadness can send her off to the wailing wall in the yard that is her solace.

Lily (Dakota Fanning) has told a glib story about being orphaned and seeking an aunt but she's really come here because she knows her mother once did.

The underlying story of what happened to Lily and her mother and her father is a mystery that never gets satisfyingly explored, even though that exploration seems to be the underlying point of Lily's existence--other than settling in with the Boatwright ladies and learning about bee-keeping. August has some information to offer Lily about her past which is heartwarming, as all her moments are, but not particularly enlightening. Obviously Lily is looking for a substitute family and she has found three mothers, but other than bathing in the glow of loving kindness it's not clear what the story's about. Whatever the bees' "secret life" is, we get only a glimpse of it.

The real point of events in the present moment may be Lily's flirtation with August's godson, Zach (Tristan Wilds), who also gets beaten up by white racists as an offshoot of their friendship. So the need for civil rights action at this crucial, troubled moment in American history keeps getting hammered in on us, but it tends to seem an abstraction so long as Lily and Rosaleen live in the Eden of the bee farm presided over by Queen Latifah. There's something touching about Lily's neediness and Fanning's way of glomming onto Latifah seems quite real. But Lily is a void. As she says, all her life has been a hole trying to be filled, because of her missing mother. Though at the center of things, she's really most of all merely an observer. She's one of those characters who's noting everything down in her head because she's going to grow up to be a writer just as Zach wants to grow up to be a lawyer. In her own way Dakota Fanning, with her aged child's face, is as arresting as the others, but somehow as a personality she seems a bit thin. Haggard rather than luminous, she's so precocious she seems to have long ago abandoned real childhood and turned to child roles as a shtick. Yet she has a way to go before becoming a grown-up actor.

The English actor Paul Bettany has the thankless task of playing a character even more incomplete and unhappy than Lily.

The idea of a white person who's saved by blacks at a time when it's the blacks who need the saving feels uncomfortable to me. Nontheless with all these fine actors and the warmth--there's no other word--of the Boatwright sisters' household and the authenticity and skill of all these actors, it turns out that despite all the honey and honey-making, treacly sweetness is avoided. Three are lots of nice moments--but unlike The Color Purple, which this resembles, there's no deep emotional power. Nor does The Secret Life of Bees provide an atmosphere in which subtlety can occur, as indicated by the fact that all the white characters are either ardent civil rights activists (or activists in the making like Lily) or full time KKK members. The American South of 1964 seems a world mythologized rather than recreated, and the realities of what it would be like for a white kid to live in a southern black family are not broached.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.