Entertaiment

Akeelah and the Bee – A Story of Transformation
By Orson Scott Card

We really wanted to see Akeelah and the Bee when it was still in the theaters this summer, but we were distracted by overhyped nonsense movies just often enough that we missed our chance.  So when we saw the DVD in Target the other day, we bought it and watched it the very next night.

What a wonderful story!  Akeelah is a 7th grade girl in a broken-down middle school in South Central Los Angeles, but she has a mind like a sponge – she learns things so easily that she tries to conceal her excellence from the bullies at school who like to beat up smart kids.

Almost against her will, she gets involved in a spelling bee and discovers that she actually likes both the competition and the chance to be really good at something.  Her father, who died when she was six, used to play Scrabble with her; words are something she uses to stay close to him in memory.

Her school principal finds her a coach – a semi-retired UCLA professor with problems of his own, who demands the best from her and gets it.

This is structured like a sports film – a fictional one, so that it’s not necessarily about winning, but about people transforming each other’s lives in a good way.  So deftly has writer/directly Doug Atchison created his story that there are not just one but five relationships that become important to us in this movie.

The most important one is Akeelah’s relationship with her widowed mother (played magnificently by Angela Bassett), a hospital worker who is struggling to keep her family fed and sheltered while keeping her second son out of gang life.  She barely has time to notice Akeelah’s brilliance, and at first resists what she sees as a waste of time.

Then there’s Dr. Larabee (a smoldering performance by Laurence Fishburne), the coach who was once in the national spelling bee himself, who has his problems of his own that Akeelah ends up helping him to heal.

Two of the kids she meets in competition are important to her.  Javier Mendez is a cheerful kid who placed thirteenth in the nationals the previous year.  He befriends her at once and includes her in his life – which is in Woodland Hills, a long, long bus ride away from South Central.  J.R. Villarreal plays him with such warmth and insouciance that we feel like we’ve made a friend.

Naturally, there has to be an arch-rival, a Chinese-American boy, Dylan Chiu (Sean Michael), whose father drives him to the point where there is no joy in competition for him.  But this movie doesn’t hate anybody: We watch as Akeelah refuses to accept Chiu’s disdain for her and insists on caring more about him than she does about herself.

Akeelah’s best friend (Sahara Garey), who pushed her into the competition, feels shunted aside when Akeelah starts to hang out with new friends from the spelling-competition community.

But then there’s Akeelah’s relationship to her whole downtrodden community.  When Akeelah’s victories in spelling bees become fodder for the local news, her brother’s gang-banger friends insist that he help her study.  Her mother, her friends, the postman, the erstwhile gang members – all become a part of her effort to learn five thousand new words on flash cards.

Amid this excellent cast, Keke Palmer, who plays Akeelah, shines forth as the heart and root of the story.  Her performance is absolutely unaffected and real; what we see is genuine talent, not child-star chops; this girl is going to grow up to be genuine Oscar-bait.  And since all the children give superb performances, we can also see Doug Atchison as one of those rare directors who can and should work with children – he brings out the best in all of them.

Naturally, with a mostly-black cast, this movie will be perceived as being aimed at an African-American audience.  But it is not.  It is aimed at an audience of people who believe that excellence is worth aspiring for and that it’s a good thing for people to seek and get help in achieving worthwhile goals.  It’s about sportsmanship, and keeping the important things in life in perspective.

Which makes it sound almost like medicine, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  It’s a joy to watch such a well-written, well-acted, well-made movie.  So sensitive is the director’s touch that we never feel like we’re being squeezed to wring emotion from us.  The whole thing feels real, and at the end, we’re glad we spent time with these good people.