Bee Season

The most difficult literary adaptations involve books that focus heavily on the internal worlds of their characters, a force certainly at work in Myla Goldberg's brilliant 2001 bestseller, Bee Season. Regrettably, the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel attempt to make up for what we can't see on screen with nettlesome voice-overs by multiple characters and obtuse special effects. The result is a film that desperately tries to be the next Searching for Bobby Fisher but, instead, flounders as the worst literary adaptation I've ever seen.

Saul Naumann (Richard Gere) is a domineering Judaism professor who throws his mind, but not his heart, into both his studies and his family. Saul's wife (Juliette Binoche) is haunted by her past while his son (Max Minghella) is perhaps too capricious with his future. However, the bulk of the film focuses on daughter, Eliza (newcomer Flora Cross), who turns out to be a spelling wunderkind, leading the previously insouciant Sal to try to infuse her training with Kabbalic mysticism.

McGhee and Siegel (The Deep End) drain Goldberg's layered prose of any subtlety, trading the novel's complex characters for wanton types who re-order their whole lives based on a car accident or a pretty girl. Worse, they appear utterly uninterested in staging the spelling bees themselves and make embarrassing errors that mar the film and especially its ending. It's tempting to lay some of the blame on screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhall (Running on Empty) until you listen to her excellent commentary track with producer Albert Berger, in which she laments how her vision of the film was undercut by the directors in basically every scene.

The disc features a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and a 1.33:1 full screen version on opposing sides with the option of Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0. The special features are idiotically scattered on the opposing sides of the disc. On the widescreen side is the Gyllenhall/Berger commentary track and a self-congratulatory track by the directors, who come off just as asinine and disinterested as Gere's character. There's also a collection of pointless deleted scenes and the brief featurette "The Making of Bee Season," which mainly consists of Gere blabbing about his role.

On the full screen side, there's "The Cutting Room Floor," which has the characters displaying the very vibrance lacking in the moribund film and "The Essence of Bee Season," in which a few scholars discuss the Kabbalic concept of Tikkun Olam. -- Colin Miller