Runners World

By some evil twist of fate, Spirit of the Marathon showed up in the mailbox and Tribeca 2008 veteran Run for Your Life had a one-week engagement at the Village East the same time I was on crutches and had to give up running a half-marathon after screwing up my left calf muscle. Still, I watched both movies: I am your dedicated film critic, after all. I write my brief thoughts several weeks later, having returned to training too soon and straining my right calf muscle. The world is unfair sometimes.

In time for the fall racing season, two running-themed documentaries, Spirit of the Marathon and Run for Your Life, arrived on DVD. Both are likely to hold more interest for those who lace up their sneakers on a regular basis, although non-athletic New Yorkers also may enjoy the latter, a look at adopted son Fred Lebow.

As a newbie runner, I prefer Spirit of the Marathon, which tracks (no pun intended) six people preparing for the 2005 Chicago Marathon. Director Jon Dunham could’ve composed his film better: The focus is heavier on some non-famous faces (father and longtime runner Jerry, hard-luck Leah) than others (Jerry’s daughter, rookie Rona), and timelines don’t always compute. I also wish I learned more about the course beyond that it’s flat and fast, which any casual marathon follower knows, and additional background about training would help non-track stars. When Dunham shows the runners discussing diet, pace groups and mileage plans, though, my own (curtailed) training plans were awakened. And as cheesy as it may sound, it’s inspiring to see anyone complete 26.2 miles of running.

As a critic, I like Run for Your Life better because director Judd Ehrlich really captures his subject’s 1970s heyday with archival footage (short shorts!), disco-style fonts and funky music. Lebow was one of those colorful, only-in-New-York stories, a Romanian immigrant and garment worker who grew the city’s marathon from laps around Central Park in 1970 to today’s five-borough behemoth. Lebow was quite the showman, getting Playboy Bunnies to run the first women’s mini-marathon and creating races for every occasion. Ehrlich doesn’t incorporate the non-running parts of Lebow’s biography as smoothly as the marathon ones; the talking heads babble more than bring their man into focus. Fortunately, Run for Your Life rebounds in its final laps with Lebow’s own poignant race journey after his cancer diagnosis.

Second Chances

My friends Cori and Michelle are big fans of Kristin Scott Thomas, but I always found her icy and brittle. Tell No One began to change my mind - I had no idea she could be overtly sexy - and I've Loved You So Long made me appreciate her in a way I hadn't before. I'd really like to see her receive an Academy Award nomination for this performance. It's less likely, but I'd also like to see her co-star, Elsa Zylberstein, get a Supporting Actress nod.

I've Loved You So Long would make a worthy companion piece with Rachel Getting Married: difficult, well-acted stories of redemption featuring multiple fantastic female performances.

Instead of making a woman-in-prison drama, writer/director Philippe Claudel examines a return to life on the outside in I’ve Loved You So Long. With his debut feature, Claudel employs Kristin Scott Thomas’ misused reserve to stunning effect and introduces many Americans to a talented French actress, Elsa Zylberstein. Nothing happens easily in this French film; rather, Claudel and his actors subtly edge forward.

Scott Thomas turns prior criticisms of being distant and remote (see Random Hearts, The Horse Whisperer) to her benefit here. Juliette Fontaine is understandably reticent: She just got out of prison after 15 years for killing her 6-year-old son. Being blunt horrifies people; keeping quiet causes folks to think her aloof. A social worker pries, and well-meaning professor sister Lea (Zylberstein), who’s taken Juliette in, jabbers on. Why shouldn’t Juliette want to hang around the house in a drab overcoat, smoking?

Watch Scott Thomas as Juliette learns to feel. When Juliette first smiles it’s awkward, as if someone’s instructing her muscles to move. As Juliette becomes more comfortable with her nieces and potential suitor Michel (Laurent Grevil), her body relaxes; grinning becomes second nature. Throughout the movie, we wonder how Juliette could murder her child. The climactic explanation falls short, moving but too easy. Still, Scott Thomas is wrenching when Juliette explores long-buried anguish.

I’ve Loved You So Long isn’t just Juliette’s story. Lea first seems to reside in Paris Disneyland, trying to create the perfect family. Really, she’s that genuine and warm, yet slowly, her own layers reveal themselves. We sense her loss over missed connections when Juliette was jailed during Lea’s adolescence. We hear a quick but biting exchange about why Lea and husband Luc chose adoption. Lea’s angry breakdown while discussing Crime and Punishment with her students therefore carries added potency, thanks to the slowly building emotions we’ve seen from Zylberstein. It’s a cathartic moment.

Between I’ve Loved You So Long and the summer mystery Tell No One, Scott Thomas never has been more alive on screen. Funny it took performing in French to tap into previously unexplored depths of the British actress’ range.

Love Story

Where WALL-E has been out for six months and now appears on every other 10-best list, I couldn't write a traditional review of the film. I found that when I rewatched it two weeks ago, the same things jumped out at me as they did on the August viewing. At the very least, that made my thoughts a little easier to compile.

And yes, I teared up both times at the end.

The cutest couple of 2008 is … a robot duo.

Cinema love stories often begin with a “meet cute.” Lonely, binocular-eyed Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class meets his iPod-smooth love, Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, when she comes to an I Am Legend-like Earth with a directive to seek sustainable life. Our trash-compacting collector – he likes a ring box, tosses the jewelry – is the last thing standing, except a cockroach – and a single plant.

WALL-E, Pixar’s latest offering, has much to say: satire about consumer culture, environmental warning, Easter Egg hunt for film geeks. (Aliens’ Sigourney Weaver is the voice of a computer! It’s a 2001 parody!) After two viewings of this movie, what I remember most is the tenderness between WALL-E and EVE, whose vocal portrayers (Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight) convey so much mostly with chirps and blips.

Director Andrew Stanton uses Hello, Dolly – a worn-out VHS tape serves as WALL-E’s only human companion – to telegraph emotions, but the film reference I think of most is City Lights. WALL-E and EVE have a Chaplin-esque quality to their interactions and a physical connection as sweetly romantic as those found in great Jane Austen adaptations.

WALL-E becomes more ordinary once the action shifts to the spaceship Axiom and Stanton enforces parables about a machine-driven world making humans fat and lazy. Even there, th0ugh, we have moments of beauty: Movie magic occurs with WALL-E, EVE and a fire extinguisher, accented by Thomas Newman’s lovely score. Despite its second-half flaws, love conquers all in WALL-E.

A Guest Review Or Two

My friend Mark asked whether his analysis of the cult film The Room would make it to my blog. Well, Mark, not only will your review of that, but so will your comments on Wanted. :)

The Room was more than I had hoped for. I did develop a conspiracy theory about The Room before i saw it and the film confirmed my suspicions.

Tommy Wiseau is a naive fella with a decent heart, but some inner craziness. A woman used him for a long time and tried to dump him several times but he completely missed the cues, etc so she just cheated on him with his best friend... more than once. In his despair, Tommy worked tirelessly to secure funding to make a film to show the world what an evil whore she is.

And the movie was born.

Seriously, the movie confirmed all of this for me.

I saw a truly awful movie this weekend. Wanted with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman (why, Morgan, why?). I did enjoy the action sequences (except for the ones where bullets went through brains). But the dialogue and plot were aimed towards losers who think they are God's gift to bad-asses. It was so bad that I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth to enjoy the visually stunning action sequences.

For additional information, the Entertainment Weekly article on the phenomenon that is The Room:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20246031,00.html

Why Did I Do This to Myself?

I don't like Baz Luhrmann. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is on my hypothetical list of the 10 worst movies ever. (Sorry, Sandra and Cori.) I didn't care for Moulin Rouge beyond the costumes and cinematography. Nicole Kidman hasn't impressed me in years. Epics aren't my thing.

And yet I said I wanted to see Australia. I wanted to see it on the big screen, figuring such grandeur needed largesse.

Shame on me.

Listen, dear readers: I shall tell you of a magical land called Oz.

No, not that Oz. I wish it were that Oz.

In this Oz, we have a fish out of water, the plight of the Aboriginals, a cattle drive, rival ranchers, mismatched lovers, World War II and an oft-referenced Judy Garland ditty - all in two hours and 45 minutes. Sounds like a laundry list? Then welcome to Australia, an epic that endures for all the wrong reasons.

Baz Luhrmann seems to want to direct 1940s-style grandeur as if he made Australia in the 1940s. This means obvious soundstage sequences, bad CGI, awkward cutaways and a Nicole Kidman performance that wants to evoke Katharine Hepburn but plays as scattered or cold. Kidman can't register emotion on her face: Sad, concern and compassionate all read as "constipated," while her vocal mannerisms during the early Outback scenes make her sound hysterical. Luhrmann directed Kidman to an Oscar nomination in 2001's Moulin Rouge. What happened here?

The Sexiest Man Alive shows up in the Clark Gable/Rhett Butler role as the Drover. Even after Kidman's Lady Sarah Ashley gets together with our independent-minded cattle man, he's still "the Drover," "Mr. Drover" or just "Drover." Apparently, Australia's four screenwriters couldn't be bothered to provide a first name for Hugh Jackman's character. He's nice to look at, though, whether clean-shaven in a dinner jacket or rugged and unkempt.

Luhrmann tries to inject a history lesson/apology by weaving in the abysmal account of the Stolen Generations, where mixed-race Aboriginal children were removed forcibly from their families and integrated into white society. Meet Nullah (non-pro Brandon Walters), a young boy orphaned after his Aboriginal mother dies and his white father (Ashley rival Neil Fletcher, played by David Wenham) never acknowledges him. Nullah serves as narrator, parenting link to barren Lady Sarah and widowed Drover, cute child, etc. The Aboriginal past is a woeful subject worth learning, but one better covered in 2002's Rabbit-Proof Fence. Nullah's narration also eventually becomes precocious.

I haven't even touched on the Wizard of Oz/"Over the Rainbow" motif - sweet initially, beaten down by the fifth reference. Or the fact that Australia feels like at least two movies. It could have ended at an hour and 40 minutes in as an OK adventure saga. But no, we had to involve the war, separate our lovers after a quarrel and further illustrate the plight of the Aboriginals. (All right, that last part was compelling.) This section has the look and feel of a Pearl Harbor sequel, something no one was clamoring for.

Did I like anything? The orangey light at Faraway Downs was lovely, the cattle drive suspenseful and scary. (You'll worry about being trampled.) I could stare at Jackman for hours. None of this is enough to sustain two hours and 45 minutes.

What did I learn from Australia? Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion are the only ones who should transport anyone to any Oz.

My Hometown, My Profession

In a serendipitous turn of events, the last two movies I saw had personal meaning. I'll always seek out a Boston-set indie, and I'll usually watch flicks with editors (and, by extension, reporters). That I found two films in a 24-hour period that covered both topics - it was like a Christmas present from Hollywood.

Does the quality of a print affect your film experience? At What Doesn't Kill You, a thin, vertical yellow-green line split the screen in two for the final third of the film. The dialogue also came across as muffled, although I'm not sure whether that was the print, a sound-adjustment issue at the Village East, or a filmmaker flaw. They were a distraction when I was watching the movie.

My screening at Nothing but the Truth was uneventful, except that I really missed my friends Sandra (in Syracuse) and Cori (in Maryland) and wished I'd invited my friend Michelle (who lives here) along. I'm yearning for some good discussion and debate with my intelligent, journalist girlfriends.

By the way, I will not see a movie just because it's set in my hood. As much as I like Anne Hathaway, I really don't want to see Bride Wars. It looks AWFUL, and my friend who has a thing for her concurs. (Then again, I can't picture Kirk at a romantic comedy to begin with.)

The Yari Film Group recently released two Hollywood-pedigreed films with connections to my life: the Boston-based crime drama What Doesn’t Kill You and the journalism/motherhood polemic Nothing but the Truth. While the former rang more true, the latter grabbed me far more - proof of the value of a good yarn.


Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke join Matt, Ben, Casey and even Paul Newman in the triple deckers of cinema South Boston in What Doesn’t Kill You. Writer/director Brian Goodman bases the film on the years he (Ruffalo) and best friend Paulie (Hawke) did odd jobs for Irish mob bosses before striking out on their own, Brian battled drugs, and the two landed in prison. Goodman, a first-time director, produces some of his stars’ best work: wiry, shaved Hawke scaring and scheming; Ruffalo ravaged by addiction but yearning to regain his family’s respect; Amanda Peet, as Brian’s wife, tired and repeatedly disappointed. Much of What Doesn’t Kill You recalled home: the comment about yuppies converting Southie to condos, the winter palate of gray and sharp white. Still, the film feels “done,” coming soon after Gone Baby Gone. Do filmmakers think Boston is good only for booze-laden crime dramas or plastic rom-coms?

With stories of a female vice-presidential candidate (The Contender) and the first female president (Commander-in-Chief) on his resume, Rod Lurie demonstrates welcome appreciation for powerful women. His latest writing/directing effort, Nothing but the Truth, examines what journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) does to protect sources who outed CIA agent Erica van Doren (Vera Farmiga), even at the expense of her family and the threat of jail. The film uses Judith Miller and Valerie Plame as a jumping-off point; then Lurie enhances the conversation with discussions about sexism and women’s decisions in balancing job and motherhood. Truth could skew melodramatic; fortunately, Lurie, Beckinsale and Farmiga present Rachel and Erica as complex women rather than martyrs, people whose ambitions shape them as much as their parenting skills. The final twist provoked sputtering in my editor self, and the plot flourishes can be a bit much, yet overall, Truth’s intelligence grips and refreshes.

Harvard Beats Itself Into My Good Graces - For Once

My dislike of Harvard is almost as old as my dislike of football. Why, then, would I see a documentary about a sport I don't care for where my least-favorite college besides Duke is depicted in a positive light? Answer: The Film Forum description and a Wall Street Journal column.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a hoot, just a lot of fun even for the documentary-averse. It's still playing in one podunk NYC theater, Cinema Village. Catch it there, or be sure to track down the DVD early next year.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 tells a tale likely never seen on celluloid: the big, bad Crimson as underdog.

And it's a true story.

Director Kevin Rafferty's documentary appears simply made: 60-year-old men reminiscing around tables about a pigskin matchup 40 years ago, interlaced with grainy game footage and Don Gillis’ broadcast. Actually, it only looks simple - in fact, Harvard grad Rafferty builds suspense and humor into a movie whose outcome is known all along.

On Nov. 23, 1968, Harvard and hated rival Yale headed into the final game of the season, both undefeated for the first time since 1909.

The Bulldogs possessed glamour: higher ranking; quarterback who hadn't lost since junior high; running back who would land in the NFL Hall of Fame (Calvin Hill). We haven’t even touched on Garry Trudeau and Meryl Streep.

Meanwhile, Harvard had a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, an unsettled quarterback situation and a local paper that seemed shocked by victory. (Harvard also featured an offensive guard who went on to other fame: Tommy Lee Jones, very droll here.)

With 42 seconds left in the game, Yale was up 29-13. Then, somehow … (The film’s title comes from the Crimson headline.)

Harvard Beats Yale entertains as Yale students chant “You‘re Number Two!” and charms with player interviews, which feature anecdotes about the war, campus life and the game. Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren personifies Rafferty’s storyline building: First coming off as the ultimate privileged snob (“douchebag,” one theatergoer muttered), he proves to be more than a man who liked making cheap tackles.

Jones’ contribution? Let’s just say that after this movie, you'll never view a telephone keypad the same way again.

Sing It Out

I've done some research since I saw Cadillac Records two weeks ago, and I'm learning that it's taken some considerable liberties with the time and the story. If I were a blues aficionado, this probably would bother me more. Since I'm not, I'm sticking with my initial reaction to the film, which was ...

I really, really liked Cadillac Records; it was an unexpected, underrated treat. Josee suggested it at the last minute for my birthday celebration, and it was a far better (and shorter) fit than our initial plan to see Australia. Cadillac Records made me miss my father, too: We saw Ray together a few years ago on one of our father/daughter outings. He'd really like this, but he doesn't go to movies by himself. Come on, Dad - get Mom to take you then.

Like the most manic concert, Cadillac Records swoops and soars; hips will swivel during the tale of a Chicago blues label’s rise and fall. Although the film hits some bum notes in its storytelling and fidelity to history, it has a dynamism few flicks have matched this year.

First - the brilliance that is Jeffrey Wright. He played Colin Powell this fall, in W; his career includes turns as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Martin Luther King Jr., the villain in the Shaft remake and Felix in the last two Bond movies. Here, as Muddy Waters, Wright does some of the best work of his career. Where is his Oscar buzz?

It's not that Wright looks or sounds like the blues great, the first major discovery for Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody). Rather, it's how he embodies Waters as the man goes from sharecropper to success, pleased with the Cadillacs bestowed on him but wary about the missing profits. (Writer/director Darnell Martin glosses more than she should here.) He's a lousy husband to Geneva (Gabrielle Union), but a combustible pull links them. Even while wearing a do-rag best saved for a day at the beauty shop, Wright is the “cat men want to be and women want to be with.”

Joining Wright in the fierce and fiery department: surprisingly, Beyonce Knowles. Previously, in such work as Dreamgirls and The Fighting Temptations, the singer/actress just posed before the camera. As Etta James, Knowles doesn't just break free from her glass box - she incinerates her self-imposed prison. She's ballsy, she delivers searing interpretations of James' hits (feel the rage in “All I Could Do Was Cry”) - she's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore. Knowles especially conveys James' bitter heartbreak after a long-awaited meeting with her biological father goes awry. Knowles has adopted the persona "Sasha Fierce" in her day job; now we see its origins.

In fact, Cadillac Records contains an album's worth of acting hits: Columbus Short as troubled harmonica great Little Walter, Eamonn Walker as powerful blues man Howlin' Wolf, Mos Def as Chuck Berry, Cedric the Entertainer as Willie Dixon (who also “narrates,” in a way bordering on cutesy-folksy).

The problem with this abundance of riches is that Martin doesn't know how to harness everything, and she sacrifices story streamlining for simply more story. The entire Berry segment feels shoehorned, despite Def’s playful, Gumby-like antics. Walker mesmerizes - he has a smoldering, scary come-hither nod - but his screen time feels shortchanged, and we don’t really have a true sense of the relationship between Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Martin also ignores the role of Leonard Chess’ still-living brother in the creation of the record label. Perhaps his story wasn’t dramatic enough.

Music biopics are a genre cliché (Ray, Walk the Line, La Bamba ...), so films of this subject must find ways to distinguish themselves. Cadillac Records does so with its platinum lead actor, Wright, and its gold-standard ensemble. Flaws and all, this movie sings.

Nuns and Nazis

Confession Number Whatever: I think the hype surrounding Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet is a bit much. Sure, they're good actresses, but the be all and end all of film? No, I don't think so.

In other words, when I saw their latest prestige projects on the same day, I had to do a joint review.

The calendar has turned to December, which means Oscar talk and chatter about two of today’s most lauded actresses, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet. The 14- and five-time Academy-Award nominees make their seemingly annual cases for the gold statue: Meryl and her latest accent as a nun in Doubt, Kate as a woman in emotional hiding (but certainly not physical) in The Reader. The films, literary adaptations both, present troubling scenarios and to their credit don’t always provide solutions. They’re also flawed productions, with less-than-perfect work from their leading ladies.

(Yes, Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood Foreign Press and Academy: Winslet’s role is a lead performance, not a supporting one. Let her compete against herself in Revolutionary Road and have voters decide where she’s better.)

With Streep and Doubt, the issue is overreaching and, subsequently, staginess. John Patrick Shanley brings his Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play to the screen, a gripping tale of possible pedophilia at a Bronx parish. It’s 1964, and the winds of change - oh, those winds - are rustling. Is the attention Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) shows the school’s first black student (Joseph Foster) compassionate [Donald has no friends but a keen interest in religion] or something more sinister [this is Flynn’s third parish in five years]? Did the young Sister James (Amy Adams, whose naivete borders on dense) misconstrue matters, or were her suspicions to Sister Aloysius (Streep) correct? “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and as sustaining as certainty” - but how certain are the thoughts motivating Sister Aloysius?

Shanley, who directs as well as writes, uses cinema’s more visual nature to play up Doubt’s metaphors. This becomes a liability. It’s not enough to hear Aloysius say, “It’s my job to outshine the fox in cleverness.” We have to see a cat going after a mouse and the leaves falling from the trees, and we have to hear the breezes over and over again, like a sound machine on the fritz. The text is strong enough on its own; Shanley should have trusted his words. He also doesn’t seem to realize actors don’t speak on film the way they do in a theater. The long-building confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn comes across more as a screaming fest, with Hoffman and especially Streep forgetting it’s about emotion, not projection.

Hoffman said in a Wall Street Journal interview that he had to decide about his character’s guilt or innocence before he began filming, although he hoped the audience couldn’t tell what his choice was. I certainly couldn’t; I changed my mind about Flynn’s motivations a half-dozen times. Excluding the Big Blowup, Hoffman acts with subtlety, unlike Ms. Meryl. She can’t help the existence of the pilgrim-like costume, but she also doesn’t help us see past it. The ruler, the broad inflection, the dour expression - it’s practically a parody of a nun. Viola Davis, in one 10-minute scene with Streep as Donald’s mother, modulates and conveys more feeling that her more-famous co-star.

As for Generation X’s kudos queen, Winslet strips down again, this time as a 30-something woman in 1958 having a fling with a boy she always calls “kid.” She discovers him sick in an alley, and she likes to be read to. The affair ends abruptly, and then it’s seven years later. The “kid,” Michael (David Kross), is 22, a law student and observing the trial of several female Nazi prison guards - one of whom happens to be Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), his summer lovin’.

At one point, The Reader might as well have been The Hours, Part 2: best-selling book (this one by Bernhard Schlink) adapted by David Hare for a film directed by Stephen Daldry starring Nicole Kidman. Substitute Winslet for Kidman, who dropped out due to pregnancy, but otherwise The Reader resembles of one of those cold, arty Kidman flicks such as Birth, Fur and, yes, The Hours. Even Winslet’s German-accented English sounds like Kidman’s speech. Winslet gets Hanna’s stern, disconnected nature right, yet when we’re supposed to connect to Hanna reading later, the actress appears to be smothered by her old-lady makeup.

Then again, the hardest part of The Reader is how distasteful so much of it is. The link between literature and lust could be luscious - if only the surrounding circumstances weren’t so lewd. Kross, the “kid” who plays Michael, displays maturity and none of the precocious fumbling seen in “I lost my virginity” stories. Still, he was 17 when filming began; Daldry had to shut down production until the actor was 18 to film the sex scenes. No matter how one looks at it, this is discomforting: If the gender roles were reversed, women’s groups would be protesting this a la Lolita. Where’s the outcry here? Furthermore, the music swells most romantically when Ralph Fiennes (the grown-up Michael) is reading novels into a tape recorder for a jailed, guilty Nazi prison guard. Hanna never expresses remorse for what she’s done - she even asks a judge whether she should have not taken a job at Siemens - yet we’re supposed to be captivated by the pull this love of a sort still has on Michael after all these years? I’d recommend a good therapist.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

No, not the holidays - it's time for critics' awards.

The lede on Richard Corliss' article was written for someone like me. When theaters have a glut of good product, as those in New York do now, I need help narrowing down the list. Now I know I should start with Milk and Doubt (both only $6 if I go to an AMC theater this weekend before noon), and then I should catch up with Happy-Go-Lucky. (Alas, that's only at the Sunshine, a Landmark Theatre, and it will be at least double that.)

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1866046,00.html

By the way, it now costs $12.50 to see a movie in New York City for full price, and that's only a regular feature. Tack on more for IMAX or even, now, 3-D. Price gouging, I tell you.

One Year and One Day Ago ...

I started this blog.

The Secret Life of Bees, which I saw just before Thanksgiving, was the quintessential Sunday-morning matinee experience: decent, entertaining, a solid B. I liked it.

“I killed my mother when I was 4 years old. She was all I ever wanted, and I took her away.” Those damning words, which open The Secret Life of Bees, come from 14-year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) and hold juicy, mysterious promise. Alas, Bees morphs into a better-than-average Lifetime movie, although its exemplary cast disguises the script’s soft center well.

In 1964 Georgia, Lily lives with her abusive father (Paul Bettany) and black nanny (Jennifer Hudson). Lily’s trip to help Rosaleen register to vote turns violent, so they disappear to Tiburon, South Carolina, guided only by a black Mary picture. That leads them to the Boatwright sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo); lessons of love and racial awareness commence.

When writer/director Gina Prince-Blythewood (Love and Basketball) sticks to the framework of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, Bees flowers, despite Kidd’s sometimes-florid prose. (Prince-Blythewood can’t fix the underdeveloped Rosaleen arc, though.) The more she deviates - Lily wouldn’t have been able to sit in a “colored” section at the movies - the more the film loses its sting. And musical montages should banned unless your aim is to reside in the chick-flick ghetto.

The performances, especially from Fanning and Latifah, make it easier to overlook Bees’ flaws. Fanning, whose early work bordered on preternaturally adult, has matured into her talent. At one point, Lily has no dialogue for almost 10 minutes as she watches the drama around her. Fanning grabs us just by observing and absorbing. As she often does, Latifah provides a steady hand, this time as beekeeper/head of household August. While she’s played variations of Mother Hen in everything from Chicago to Beauty Shop, Latifah’s presence always welcomes and reassures.

Bees isn’t quite as sweet as honey, but the strength of its women make for a pleasant cinematic experience.