Akeelah and the Bee DVD Review

In Akeelah and the Bee, a young girl in a poor neighborhood of Los Angles has a chance to participate in a city spelling bee that offers the winner to move all the way up to the National competition. This will be the first time her school has participated in the City Spelling Bee. Her school principle has the idea of a school spelling bee to attract augmented funding for the low-property tax inner city school.

Akeelah has a family story that makes her a natural at spelling competitions. With her principle' encouragement, Akeelah wins a place under the tutelage of a UCLA linguistics professor. She also stumbles onto unexpected friendships with spelling champions from one of LA's high-class neighborhood schools. Akeelah begins to find these new advantages strangely add new complications as events unfold in Akeelah and the Bee.

Scenes at Akeelah's school show the difficulty of academic success in an underfunded environment where the students are without extra encouragement to rise above the mundane distractions and advance their intellectual capacities: to apply that buoyant curiosity and energy to facts, figures and mental processes. Contrasts in Akeelah and the Bee between this environment and the other side of town, which Akeelah stumbles into through the kind gestures of a boy at the City Spelling Bee, are evident and realistically painted. The stage is nicely set for the contest of morphemes and moral fiber as the training, stakes and competitions intensify.

Keke Palmer, Akeelah, has a quiet, low-key, Annette Funicello-esque quality about her acting. Her performance, though not riveting, is genuine and spell binding and she lives in your imagination long after the rhythm of the spelling bees are over and done. Laurence Fishburne is a perfect scholarly old curmudgeon, Dr. Larabee, who makes himself appear to be the Grinch of Spelling Bess. It takes a while to find out how much of this gruffness is exterior and how much is interior. Both these two characters find a compliment in J.R Villarreal as Javier and Sean Michael as Dylan who are competing against and sometimes training with Akeelah. And when we get to the final resolutions to the complex and multi-layered conflict, Sean Michael (Dylan) shows real greatness in his performance, a crucial one for the completion of the high aims of Akeelah and the Bee.

Akeelah's family (Angela Bassett as Mom) adds an agitating dimension to Akeelah and the Bee, one that is the real-life story behind many doors on the streets of Los Angels neighborhoods. Director Doug Atchinson, a relative newcomer, paints a true picture, one which is not irrelevant to the movie: it is these realities that conspire to quell the greatness that exists in the young people of these neighborhoods but can't find a strong enough beam to balance on and tight-rope walk across to solid ground, stable enough for expression, expansion and fulfillment of their innate inner talents. Additionally, romance in an unexpected quarter adds to the depth of the family segments in Akeelah and the Bee.

The thing wrong with Akeelah and the Bee is that one of it's points - aptly captured by Doug Atchinson, who also wrote the screenplay - backfires and sabotages the film. Surrounding Akeelah are family members, community members, friends, tutors and teachers who are distanced from each other - from themselves, really - and from Akeelah. This is the true fact of Los Angeles neighborhoods. Atchinson and editor Glenn Farr chose to handle it in such a way that the distance and isolation were a sterile one-dimensional representation: there were no moments showing the potential for connectedness among these individuals.

This sterility also places the audience at a distance from the characters, effectively sabotaging reciprocity between the audience and the film. The audience can't become fully engaged with Akeelah and the Bee from this distance. This problem of disengagement clears up late in the film when the community, friends and family undergo their metamorphoses and become participants in each others lives and, especially, in Akeelah's life.

I like Akeelah and the Bee and will probable buy it to add to my collection. But because of this sabotage of the audience's engagement, I rate Akeelah and the Bee a very worthwhile and exceptionally well done 4 Stars.