by MATTHEW HAYS

Boy, did I want to like Bee Season. It is, after all, the latest entry from the directorial team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose last feature was the superb The Deep End (2001).

If you happen to have missed that movie, I urge you to catch it on DVD. It was a textbook case of economic filmic storytelling, not to mention a landmark performance by Tilda Swinton. She played a woman tortured by the inadvertent crime of her adolescent son, and the lengths she goes to in a desperate effort to protect him. That film was downright Hitchcockian in its dragging of an ordinary woman into extraordinary circumstances. It was one of the best movies of that year.

I do hope Bee Season is a career aberration for these directors. In it, Richard Gere plays a Jewish scholar, his wife (Juliette Binoche) a scientist. They have two sweet, highly intelligent children, an 11-year-old (Flora Cross) and a 16-year-old (Max Minghella). All seems perfect until Cross begins to show a strangely brilliant knack for spelling. She’s soon climbing the ranks of the spelling-bee championships, going to ever-more-prestigious competitions around the country.

In this pseudo-cautionary tale, that growing ambition at too young of an age begins to severely throw off the balance of this highly-charged, complicated family. Gere gets obsessed with tutoring her to greater heights. Binoche begins to careen off the emotional edge towards a breakdown. Minghella, meanwhile, gets the hots for a young Hare Krishna gal, which means he starts parading around in an orange bed sheet. What is the world coming to?

And what is this movie coming to, I was asking by half-time. Where The Deep End was rooted in a secular realism, with a middle-class family’s normalcy shattered by the underworld of petty crime, Bee Season is a New Agey mishmash of spiritual ideas about life, family and personal happiness—or something like that—ultimately looking more like a screenplay Oprah Winfrey wrote after ingesting too many Sudafeds.

You have been warned.

Bee Season opens Friday, Nov. 18

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