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The Secret Life of Bees Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: Not Rated (for thematic material and some violence) Genre: Drama Theater release: October 17, 2008 by Fox Searchlight Directed by: Gina Prince-Bythewood Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes Cast: Dakota Fanning (Lily Owens), Queen Latifah (August Boatwright), Jennifer Hudson (Rosaleen Daise), Alicia Keys (June Boatwright), Sophie Okonedo (May Boatwright), Paul Bettany (T. Ray Owens) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Five minutes into The Secret Life of Bees, we learn Lily Owens's (Dakota Fanning) life-altering secret: When she was just four years old, she accidentally shot and killed her mother. Lily's mom had left her and her dad, T. Ray (Paul Bettany), months earlier and had returned, according to him, simply to retrieve her belongings. Not, he stresses to now 14-year-old Lily, to retrieve her.

Father and daughter have spent the intervening 10 years in a fog of grief and abuse, which is only heightened by the racial tensions swirling about them in their small southern town (it's the summer of 1964). Lily's one consolation is sneaking out at night to dig up a box of her mom's things—silk gloves, her picture, and an illustration of a Black Madonna.

Scribbled on the back of this odd religious image is the name of a town—Tiburon, South Carolina. When T. Ray's abuse escalates and Lily's black caretaker, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), gets brutally attacked by the town racists, Lily stages their escape to this mysterious promised land. It's the one sense of direction her mother seems to have left Lily for discovering who she is and where she belongs.

Dakota Fanning as Lily

After hitch-hiking to Tiburon, Lily and Rosaleen discover that the Black Madonna image is from the label on some locally made honey. The beekeepers—August (Queen Latifah), June (Alicia Keys), and May (Sophie Okonedo) Boatwright—live in a Pepto-Bismol-pink house at the edge of town. When Lily tells them a tall tale about recently deceased parents and an aunt they're traveling toward, the sisters offer them temporary shelter on the cots in their honey house.

Before falling asleep that night, Lily announces to Rosaleen, "I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be. Now I just need to figure out why." As August takes her under her wing and teaches her the fine art of beekeeping, the why slowly reveals itself.

Lily also slowly relaxes into the community offered by these eccentric sisters. August is the independent, level-headed matriarch of the group. June is the militant who keeps others at arm's length. But the most fascinating sister is May, a complex bleeding heart who feels the world's hurts to her very bones.

These characters display the depth and dimension of those originated in a book; in fact, many of us first got acquainted with Lily, Rosaleen, and the Boatwright sisters in the pages of the New York Times bestselling book by Sue Monk Kidd. I remember plowing through the final pages of The Secret Life of Bees on a flight several years ago. I had tears streaming down my face, but I really didn't care how ridiculous I looked. The book was that good. And I was that thrilled when I heard the story was coming to the big screen.

Jennifer Hudson as Rosaleen, Lily's caretaker and friend

Any trepidation I had that the movie wouldn't do the book justice was dispelled almost instantly. Fanning is a wonderfully nuanced Lily, a not altogether sympathetic character. Though at times I would have liked Fanning to be a smidge grittier, she does a nice job of avoiding her trademark cuteness and instead offers a believable vacantness from one who's been deprived of love. Latifah is in a familiar role as the wise, calm, mother-hen of the group, and she performs the role as expertly as we've come to expect her to.

The performance that struck me most was Okonedo as May. The character isn't quite mentally challenged, but certainly has moments when that seems the case. Okonedo (an Oscar nominee in Hotel Rwanda) does a superb job of keeping this rich character from becoming a caricature. When she wails for the hurts of others, you don't want to giggle at her so much as cry with her … and for her. Hudson and Keys also turn in strong performances and round of one of the stronger female ensembles we've seen in years.

The other "inhabitant" of the Pepto-Bismol-pink house is a large wooden Black Madonna perched in the corner of the living room. At the Boatwright sisters' "church" gathering one Sunday morning, August retells the story of this mystical mother who protects and presides over them all.

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