Bee Season(movie) explores the Krishna faith

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Bee Season' explores the Krishna faith

.... mother Miriam's (Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche) own path is tied to the

ancient study, Eliza's older brother Aaron (Max Minghella) explores the

Krishna faith. ...

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Bee Season' a swirl of spelling and mysticism

 

 

By Robert K. Elder

Tribune staff reporter

 

 

Words speak to Eliza Naumann.

 

In a spelling bee, her connection to words is almost mystical. Letter by

letter, words come alive and reveal themselves to her. She's asked to spell

"dandelion" and the word floats up around her in a computer-generated swirl,

each letter a different part of the ghostly flower.

 

In "Bee Season," an adaptation of Myla Goldberg's novel by directing team

Scott McGehee and David Siegel, mysticism and spelling bees make strange

bedfellows.

 

Religious studies professor Saul (Richard Gere) suspects his daughter Eliza's

(newcomer Flora Cross) gift for spelling may tie into his graduate work on

Kabbalah, an ancient branch of Jewish mysticism. Believing that words have

power and the right words can unlock the key to the divine, Saul and his

daughter explore the secrets of Kabbalah.

 

"Bee Season" hits theaters Friday at the height of Kabbalah's pop culture

exposure, when celebs such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Ashton

Kutcher have made it a Hollywood buzzword.

 

So saturated has Hollywood become with the practice that director Steven

Soderberg, a longtime friend of McGehee and Siegel's, even takes a playful

potshot at Kabbalah in "Ocean's 12." In that movie, Topher Grace, playing a

spoiled version of himself, rips off a Kabbalah red string bracelet that is

supposed to ward off the "evil eye" and screams, "It's almost as if this

Kabbalah crap doesn't even work!" after some romantic problems.

 

But, director Siegel said, the movie isn't a recruiting poster for Kabbalah.

It is about the universal search for spirituality, he said.

 

Basics of Kabbalah

 

"We hoped that the spiritual aspects of the story, that people could identify

them without being Jewish," Siegel said on a recent visit to Chicago with

directing partner McGehee. "We tried to concentrate on the simpler ideas of

Kabbalah and create a spiritual [foundation]."

 

Not all of the religious ideas in "Bee Season" belong to Kabbalah. Though

mother Miriam's (Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche) own path is tied to the

ancient study, Eliza's older brother Aaron (Max Minghella) explores the

Krishna faith.

 

The directors felt it important to treat the Hare Krishna characters in the

movie with respect, perhaps one of the few times the faith hasn't been treated

as a punch line (remember David Leisure, a.k.a. Joe Isuzu, in "Airplane"?).

 

"The Hare Krishnas get a bad knock," Siegel said. "They're really just a

branch of Hinduism basically, and they believe in making their presence felt

so that people might join in their experience."

 

To add authenticity to some religious sequences, Krishna devotees in the Bay

Area participated in scenes in which Aaron leaves his family for a Krishna

center.

 

Like Siegel and McGehee's previous features "Suture" (1993) and "The Deep End"

(2001), "Bee Season" attempts to make sense of fractured family dynamics.

 

Eliza's study of Kabbalah and ascent to the National Spelling Bee in

Washington, D.C., complicate the issue, as the competition becomes intertwined

with family expectations.

 

Cross said conversations on set weren't tied to Kabbalah, but rather parental

relationships. Saul sees his daughter's spelling bee trances as her communing

with an aspect of divinity.

 

"I understand it that Eliza wants to make her father proud, and what would

make him proud is that she be closer to god," Cross said.

 

Balancing these two aspects was a key component to Siegel and McGehee's

telling of the story.

 

Tilda Swinton, star of "The Deep End," once described the directing pair as

"one brain, two bodies," an assessment that 12-year-old Cross agrees with.

 

"It's really strange how they work," Cross said in a recent phone interview.

"David is the one that really works with the actors, and Scott is the one that

really looks at the monitor and says, `Maybe we should do . . . '"

 

Spurring on

 

In person, however, the pair don't finish each other sentences as much as they

spur each other to expand or complete a thought.

 

"I think Kabbalah is part of the zeitgeist, because there's something about

that yearning to feel connected to something beyond us," Siegel offered. "But

why Kabbalah?" McGehee countered. "I don't know what it is about Kabbalah and

our time that has resonated."

 

"I'm just surprised that anything Jewish could actually become mainstream,"

Siegel responded.

 

"There's something about its universality that opens it up to people, I

think," McGehee said.

 

After a moment, Siegel added: "I don't think it's that confusing. It's like

yoga and meditation: Kabbalah is just one more thing that people have grabbed

onto. It's got a celebrity cachet, but it does seem like it's just one of many

things that are on the rise that are trying to connect to a different kind of

spirituality that isn't couched so much directly in a particular

faith."Neither director considers himself religious.

 

"I keep jokingly telling people that I was raised Californian," McGehee said.

 

Siegel identifies himself as Jewish, though his family was never

"super-religious," he said. Recently, however, Siegel has taken to simple

meditations in the mornings and afternoon.

 

A big influence

 

"It's certainly had a big influence, doing meditation," Siegel says. "I don't

have a teacher or anything. I just do counting meditations; they've been good

for me."

 

But Siegel's always had an intimate relationship with numbers.

 

"You also have an incredible serial memory," McGehee says. "He's like a

Rolodex; it's faster to ask David for a phone number that to look it up."

 

Does this talent carry over into spelling? He never really thought about it.

 

"When I spell, I really see words," Siegel said. "Like this little girl. . . .

A year and a half working on this movie, and I've never really thought about

that connection. I really do see the letters. I don't spell by memory."

 

When she competes, Eliza enters a trancelike state, during which the directors

insert magical, computer-animated words that unfold for Eliza, to illustrate

the way she experiences her talent. There's nothing mystical about Siegel's

spelling however.

 

Siegel said: "It's really bizarre, but it's no profound thing. I just see the

letter in Courier font."

 

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