The Secret Life of Bees

Year 17, Day 138 - 5/18/25 - Movie #5,023 - MOTHER'S DAY FILM #4 ??

BEFORE: Honestly, I wasn't too sure about this one, I mean, clearly it gets me to where I need to be next, and with three Marvel movies coming up on the schedule, anything that gets me one link closer is kind of a done deal. But does this count as a Mother's Day film?  From the synopsis it seems like the main character's mother is absent from the film, however she spends some time learning about who her mother is, or was. I suppose that counts, it's on the theme of mothers and the connection to the daughter.  

The programming decision over WHEN to watch it got taken away from me, though, when it was the night before we were scheduled to drive to North Carolina, which was on Mother's Day, and I hadn't packed yet. Well, I did go out on Friday night (to see a movie, that review is pending) so that's on me, I suppose. During the week in N.C. I didn't really have time to watch a movie, what with visiting my folks and hitting the Waffle House a few times and also there was an agricultural fair at the State Fairgrounds, if I had any time at night I spent it keeping current on my late night talk shows so my DVR at home wouldn't fill up, also the last four or five episodes of "Daredevil: Born Again", which I started watching during the cruise back in March. Well, I crossed something off the list, anyway, it was just a Marvel TV show and not a movie.  

Anyway, I'm back in NYC as of Sunday 5/18 and there's a clear path to the end of the month, even if I haven't programmed to Father's Day yet.  I wasn't going to watch a movie until Tuesday but let me watch the left-over film from the Mother's Day chain and then I can get another five films in this week. Queen Latifah carries over from "End of the Road". I've got another two films with her on my list, but they're not really on theme, so my gut says to hold off on them, I may need one for connections later on.

THE PLOT: In 1964, Lily, a lonely teenager, flees from her home and reaches a small town in South Carolina.  Once there, she finds herself in the company of the Boatwright sisters, who introduce her to a new world.  

AFTER: There's some strange stuff in this film, like Lily Owens grows up in a peach orchard with her father, T. Ray.  Her father is abusive to her, as he blames her for the death of her mother, or maybe he's just mad at the world and takes it out on her. When Lily doesn't follow his rules he makes her kneel on the floor on some spilled grits, which seems like an odd punishment. Why waste food, why not just hit her?  It seems very specific, but I'm just not familiar with this as a form of disciplining a child. 

Their housekeeper, Rosaleen, decides to register to vote now that the Civil Rights Act has been passed, but she gets in trouble after several racist white men harass her on the way to voter registration, and she decides to fight back. Her reward is getting beaten up, and while I'm sure that stuff like this went down, it's still questionable why this character couldn't have just held her tongue and not reacted to the harassment. Not blaming the victim, just wondering why she couldn't just walk away and then go quietly to register to vote and get her revenge that way.  Lily decides to run away AND break Rosaleen out of the hospital to accompany her.  It's a bit tough to say if she had Rosaleen's best interest at heart here, or she just wanted to bring her housekeeper along to take care of her on her travels. 

The goal here was to set Lily's journey against the background of the Civil Rights movement, and again, that's a bit weird to try to tell THAT story from the P.O.V. of a white girl. Lily follows her mother's path to Tiburon, SC, based on one photo in her mother's scrapbook, and somehow miraculously finds August Boatwright, who runs a local honey farm and also was her mother's nanny long ago. It's a bit of a stretch to think that one photograph and a label on a honey jar gave her all the information to track down the EXACT place that her mother went when she left her father. Then after a time spent with the Boatwright sisters, Lily's eventually able to start asking questions about her mother's history.

Lily has romantic feelings for Zach, who is an African-American teen who's the son of one member of the local prayer group, it makes sense because he also works at the apiary, and they collect the honey together, but this feels a bit forced. Lily knows that she lives in the very racist South and therefore she can't be seen dating Zach, but they do it anyway, they just enter a movie theater through different doors but AT THE SAME TIME so really, they're not fooling anyone. After they're seen sitting together in the "colored" section of the theater, Zach gets rounded up and roughed up for dating a white girl. Notably Lily does not apologize to him for not being careful enough, which seems like an odd omission. 

Zach's kidnapping, however, proves to be too much for one of the Boatwright sisters, May, who has some condition where she is too sensitive emotionally, and leaves messages in a wall of rocks on the farm as a way of dealing with her problems. Wow, Lily's presence at the Black Madonna honey farm is really a disaster for the family, and again, not a good look that taking care of a white girl causes so much pain and suffering for the black family.  She doesn't really seem all that sorry about the damage done, because it's all in the cause of her learning about her mother, and apparently there's simply nothing more important in the whole world than that. 

The film could have made more of a connection between the habits of the bees and the relationships between the people.  I'm betting there was more of this in the novel, but it got lost in translation to a screenplay.  Why tell us so much about how the hive defends the queen bee unless this is some kind of metaphor for what's going on in the world of humans?  Is Lilly the queen bee and are the Boatwright sisters supposed to be the bees that defend her?  That analogy doesn't really work, and making the white girl the "queen" is kind of a bad look.  Cooling the hive, using smoke to calm down the bees, gathering the honey, which is sometimes purple, this is all important information about beekeeping, but what's the connection to the larger story?  

Who DID kill Lily's mother?  Is Lily's memory of shooting her own mother accurate?  That's a weird thing to have in the story, because Lily loved her mother and wanted desperately to go with her and be with her, but shooting her would tend to interfere with that plan.  Was it an accident, was she trying to shoot her father but missed?  I guess that would be a hard lesson to learn, don't play with guns, kids.  Still, it's all muddled and weird, like what are we supposed to take away from this, don't shoot your own mother?  If so, we get that.  But it feels like there were more dots here that needed to be connected.  

Further proof that it's "all about the white girl", when Lily has her breakdown, and she's really mad at her mother for what happened in the past, she goes into the honey house and starts throwing jars of honey at the wall. Now she's messing with the Boatwright family's profit margin by destroying their inventory.  That family's been nothing but kind to her, they took her in and they protected her and filled her in regarding her mother's back-story, and now she's going to waste their product?  What an ungrateful little white girl - why not direct that anger at her abusive father rather than her dead mother? 

NITPICK POINT: Does somebody want to tell the prayer group members who worship a statue of a Black Virgin Mary that this was probably the figurehead on a slave ship, and that its "black power" fist salute was probably just to enable the statue to hold a lantern?  I just don't have the heart to break it to them, but they probably should know.

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (director of "The Woman King")

Also starring Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Jennifer Hudson (last seen in "Respect"), Alicia Keys (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Sophie Okonedo (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Hilarie Burton Morgan, Tristan Mack Wilds (last seen in "Red Tails"), Nate Parker (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Shondrella Avery (last seen in "Domino"), Renee Ford Clark, Sharon Conley (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Nicky Buggs, Jasmine Burke (last seen in "Ride Along"), Emma Sage Bowman, Emily Alyn Lind (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Addy Miller (last seen in "Dark Places"), Taylor Kowalski, Bob Hungerford (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Richard Todd Sullivan, Chris Moore, Bill Oberst Jr., Cullen Moss (last seen in "Dear John"), Dan Beene (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Robin Mullins (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Dan Cox (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Walt Elder (last seen in "Gifted"), Quentin Kerr, with archive footage of Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 elderberry flowers (it turns out that nobody really knows what turns some honey purple, though)