The Secret Life of Bees: The Movie vs. The Book

I do not expect a movie to be as good as the book on which it's based. Some movies fall far short. Others are reasonably good representations of the themes and characters found in the source material.

Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees is a very well-written book. Aside from a few minor plot problems, it is solid and well put together. The characters are fully formed, even if the reader has to get almost to the end before finding that out.

The movie is...ok. It's fairly well cast, especially when it comes to Sophie Okonedo, the actress who plays the unstable and tender-hearted May Boatwright. Alicia Keys is also nearly perfect as the aloof June Boatwright.

But I found myself wanting Queen Latifah to be a little less Queen Latifah, Paul Bettany to be a little less look-I'm-a-British-man-playing-a-southern-hick, Jennifer Hudson to be more of a force of nature the way Rosaleen seems in the book, and Dakota Fanning to be a more tortured Lily.

The main problem I have with the movie is not in the casting, though. It's in the glossing over of some of the book's major themes.
-The Virgin Mary is like another character in the book, one that the others interact with and know personally. In the movie, she basically just a statue in the living room to be dusted and occasionally prayed to.
-Lily does not wonder for a second if she actually caused her mother's death, something that simmers quietly under her other traumas in Kidd's work.
-And most disappointing of all, the film doesn't even begin to explore Lily's awakening to new ideas about race.

Lily is a girl who has been raised with the racial tension prevalent in mid-century South Carolina. She loves her black nanny, Rosaleen and bravely tries to defend her when things get ugly with some local white supremacists, but she still doesn't see how similar she and her black neighbors really are. It takes living with the Boatwright sisters and meeting their friends to make Lily see race is not always the thing that makes people different. It is a revelation to her to find that the Boatwright sisters are cultured and highly intelligent. It is even more of a revelation to find that Zach, the boy who helps with August Boatwright's honey business, is very attractive to her.

Lily's discoveries about race and her own feelings regarding it are often sudden and clearly expressed in her own mind. Others take longer to set in and only appear gradually. It's sad that this wasn't brought out in the film. To watch it is to have an idea of some of the broad strokes of the novel, but not the beauty and depth that make is such a good book.