Yes! It’s a two-for-one posting this week. Last week the movie Bee Season, based on the novel of the same name by Myla Goldberg, opened. I just so happened to have read the book a few months ago and was interested as to how they would adapt this quirky and delicate piece of fiction to the big, bad and scary screen.
Bee Season revolves around the Naumann family, a seemingly functional family whose secrets and tensions begin to reveal themselves after its youngest member, Eliza, qualifies for the regional spelling bee. In the book — and somewhat in the movie — the mom, Miriam, is a cold and detached ice queen who’s rarely present, even if she’s sitting at the kitchen table along with everyone else. The father, Saul, is a tornado of love who seems to only be able to focus on one thing at a time and, as a result, each child finds himself/herself competing for his affections; the thoughtful and overachieving son Aaron, much more than Eliza.
Normally neglected, after Eliza participates in the bee, her father shifts his energy from Aaron to her, setting up study sessions after school and lavishing her with attention. A resentful Aaron rebels not by experimenting with drugs or alcohol or even music and girls, but with religion. Meanwhile, Miriam’s neurosis make increasingly frequent appearances.
It’s always fascinating to see what they (“they” meaning the screenwriter, director, producers and studio execs) choose to change in a novel upon adaptation. Sometimes, it can be a small detail, however, many times it’s a major component about a character or the plot. Basically, the changes indicate what they think “works” and what they think doesn’t.
In Bee Season the novel, Saul (played in the movie by Richard Gere), is a cantor and unofficial scholar of Judaic mysticism. However, in the movie he’s a religions professor at UC Berkeley, which ends up altering the dynamics between father and son. It doesn’t make as much sense why Aaron chooses religion as his way to rebel if he’s father an open-minded professor at a liberal university; it doesn’t have the same impact as him being a cantor in a synagogue.
