Review of Akeelah and the Bee (2006) by Markb. — 01 May 2006

Midway through 2002's world-class, Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, someone describes those nationwide spelling bees that have become ESPN staples as a form of legalized child abuse. I don't think I'd go THAT far, but near the end of Akeelah and the Bee, we hear the stressed-out stage father of an obsessively hardworking contestant describe his son in a way that, while technically true, is so potentially psychically damaging that, yes, it DOES come across as cruel and unusual punishment no matter how well or how badly the poor kid ends up doing.

This sets the stage for several key events that follow, but it's a rare painful moment in a movie that's otherwise so warm, appealing and thoroughly irresistable--a feel-good movie of such a high order that I almost hate to risk giving even the slightest impression of, uh, dissing it by labeling it with that slightly pejorative term.

In fact, a comparison between this and the somewhat similarly-themed but annoyingly cliched and fraudulent classroom/ ballroom opus Take the Lead (also currently in theaters) truly illustrates Roger Ebert's pet statement (quoting Jean-Luc Godard) that the best way to criticize one movie is with another movie.

Not that Akeelah and the Bee can exactly be accused of originality, mind you; you'll definitely find traces and echoes of Rocky, The Karate Kid, The Bad News Bears, Cool Runnings, Whale Rider and many, many more, but it's obvious from early on that writer-director Doug Atchison is working from his heart rather than a checklist.

It's easy to see why Atchison has won screenwriting awards for this: in telling his tale of am inner-city junior-high school girl (Keke Palmer, who is flawless) who beats the odds and discovers her unique and special gifts by rising in the ranks of "the Bee", Atchison does a wonderful job of setting up situations, relationships and characters that yield payoffs that may sometimes be predictable but are no less completely pleasing for that.

(His use of a very simple child's toy actually leads to TWO payoffs: one heartbreaking, the other unbelievably joyous and triumphant.) I didn't say Atchison's script was exactly PERFECT:Akeelah's mom (Angela Bassett), though credibly overworked and overwhelmed, is clueless as to what her daughter's been doing away from home a bit too long to be completely convincing, and Atchison's method of pumping up suspense in an early round by logistically placing a supporting character in a logistically convenient vantage point is a wee bit TOO miraculous.

But when watching Akeelah move up, expand her horizons, develop her self-esteem and energize her community (in a montage sequence that completes Hillary Clinton's much-misunderstood statement about it taking a village to raise a child; here it works in reverse as well), I doubt that you'll be picking apart her creator's work for too long! And as effective, satisfying, funny and moving as the rest of this movie is, the national spelling bee climax delivers extraordinarily beyond expectations.

You don't have to be Cal Thomas or Michael Medved to believe that sometimes what a movie says is at least as important as how it says it, and Akeelah and her opponents do something in the final twenty minutes that beautifully encapsulates the endangered concept of "healthy competition".

In a day and time in which Mark Burnett acts as our primary advisor as to what qualifies as fair play, when America's Number One corporation practices a business philosophy of not only beating its competitors but completely annihilating them, when a leading politician sums up the current state of our nation's political discourse by comparing bipartisanship to date rape, and when it's getting near-impossible to tell whether our athletic superstars are setting records with or without pharmaceutical enhancement, the sheer decency promoted by Akeelah and the Bee and its characters makes it impossible to respond to this movie in any other way but to simply treasure it.