Review of The Secret Life of Bees (2008) by Michael H — 04 Jun 2009

This movie is never boring but it's not exciting either. It's too much of a movie to be a simple actor's piece (although I admit that all of the players are good) yet it's not enough of a film to be cinema either. In other words, it lacked the expressiveness of Jean Renoir a la The River, the boldness of Steven Spielberg, or on a literary level, the vision of Toni Morrison. As it stands, it's a character piece saturated with social/race issues that didn't strike me as having any real relevance in our lives today.

Yet as I said, I was never bored, and it can be engaging when it wants to be. It has moments and is occasionally moving, but only for its duration. When the movie was over, it stayed on the screen and not in my heart. I got the suspicion that it should have been the other way around.