There is little doubt that Gina Prince-Bythewood’s movie adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees aims straight for the heart and not for strict realism. The rural Deep South of 1964, the year when the Civil Rights Act had just been passed, could never have been this hopeful and this optimistic. But as a kind of escapist fantasy depiction of a symbolic refuge from the harsh feelings of racism and abandonment at the time, the story succeeds earnestly and movingly.
The place of refuge is the home of August Boatwright (Queen Latifah), who runs a big bee honey business with her two younger siblings, May (Sophie Okonedo) and June (Alicia Keys). Just look at the casting and we can gather a sense of how much conviction they will bring to what could be just maudlin material (including even Keys, who may not have acted much but whom I think always had an actress within her by the forcefulness she brings to her songs). All three strike such individual and very different emotional notes in the story from August’s level-headed yet lightly humorous presence to June’s stern self-protectiveness and May’s fragile personality that you do not want to perturb with any kind of tragic news.
Into this place arrives a 14-year old girl named Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning). She has been living with her abusive and unloving father, T. Ray (a nearly unrecognizable Paul Bettany) and her housekeeper, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson). When Rosaleen is wrongly arrested after she stands up to some racist men who frown on and then later beat her on her way to register to vote, Lily decides to flee from home and help Rosaleen escape out of the hospital (an undeniable parallel to Huck and Jim here). Along the way, Lily sees a label of a honey jar that has a picture identical to the one found in a time capsule belonging to her long-passed mother whom she always wanted to know more about. Following this label, they find their way to the Boatwrights.
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