Opinion: 'Bee Season' strikes emotional chord

“Bee Season” has nothing to do with the honey-producing insects that the title implies.

Rather, it refers to a spelling bee, which is the backdrop to a film that is one of the most powerfully emotional works to be released this year.

Juliette Binoche, no stranger to playing emotionally charged characters (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Damage”), outdoes herself in “Bee Season.” Her character, Miriam Naumann, is quiet but powerful. And very, very sad. It shocks the viewer’s senses when her psyche is finally revealed.

Richard Gere, who has been generally absent from the screen lately, has never been better. As Saul Naumann, the patriarch of an intensely dysfunctional family, Gere’s role is complex and compelling.

The linchpin of the film, though, is daughter Eliza, played by Flora Cross. It’s a demanding role – emotional and trying. Cross manages it well. She’s on par with Dakota Fanning, the best child actor of her generation.

There’s much amiss in the Naumann family. And nobody in the family seems able to deal with the problems at hand.

Young Eliza tries to escape by entering the national spelling bee. Her dad takes it upon himself to tutor her. There are so many other things in his life he should be addressing but his energy goes here.

Saul is a professor at University of California-Berkeley who specializes in Jewish theology and the Kabbalah. As one might imagine, he’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. He takes his role as Eliza’s tutor seriously. It’s painful, but Eliza is determined. She does well at the local level and advances to the national level. Dad is there all the way.

Son Aaron (Max Minghella) has his own revelation/revolution. Tired of his dad’s dogma that has no emotional passion, Aaron begins attending Hare Krishna meetings at a local ashram.

All along the way, Miriam’s story is slowly, painfully revealed. Her secrets are the darkest and most disturbing of anyone’s in the family.

There’s no one better able than Binoche to play a sympathetic psychotic. Her emotional fragility in this role is palpable.

For anyone who loves the power of words, “Bee Season” will hit a nerve. The directors occasionally lapse into strange graphic effects dealing with words and letters.

Saul tries to explain to Eliza how powerful letters can be. He has her dissect words, rearrange their spellings and meditate on the power of every way they can be arranged.

What makes “Bee Season” work is the adept way the directors and actors portray the characters’ search for transcendence. Each and every one is striving for something that seems impossible to attain. That feeling can be understood by any member of the audience.

If you can handle a brutally honest movie about the futility and fragility of the human condition, “Bee Season” fits the bill.

It’s not for the emotionally squeamish, though.

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.