Comprehensive information and links about Bee Season

Bee Season is a 2005 film directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel and written by Naomi Foner. The plot is based on a novel by Myla Goldberg.

Gere plays a somewhat controlling Jewish husband and father Saul Newman. His wife Miriam (Binoche) converted to Judaism when she married him, Saul nurtured his son Aaron (Minghella) into a traditional studious Jew, and tries to pull Eliza into the teachings of a Kabbalah writer.

Saul is a Religious Studies professor at UC Berkeley (although the particular courses he is seen teaching are unnamed in the film) who wrote his graduate thesis on Kabbalah. The film follows Saul's family and the religious quests they all head out on because of him.

Miriam lives a secret life throughout her entire marriage to Saul, trying to fulfill the religious idea she picked up from him, Tikkun olam. She takes the meaning of "repairing the world" and "reuniting its shards" literally and slowly collects trinkets she finds beautiful (sometimes breaking into people's houses and stealing them) in a warehouse, trying to hold the light of God in them. Saul's son, Aaron, grows unsure of the Judaism foisted on him by his father and becomes a Hare Krishna in trying to find a faith he personally believes in.

Finally (and at the center of the film) Eliza becomes Saul's newest religious project. Saul's graduate thesis was on a particular Kabbalah writer who believed that careful analysis of words could lead to contact with God, and without his knowledge Eliza has won the district spelling bee. Upon learning of her success Saul takes control of Eliza's life, trying to coach her with the Kabbalah teachings he knows so well (humorously ending up much like the controlling parent's stereotypically seen in childhood competitions like spelling bees, though with different reasons). Eliza manages to do so well at spelling because visions appear to her and help with the word, no matter how difficult, if she focuses. In the final scenes, however, Eliza purposely misspells the word origami (a word she had practiced with Saul the night before) to come in second at the National Spelling Bee.

While the literal plot simply follows a girl from a somewhat dysfunctional family moving through the world of competitive spelling, the actual plot of Bee Season is a much more complex one on personal religious views. Saul can be seen a Kabbalistic figure himself, desperately trying to become closer to God, though instead of using knowledge (as one does in Kabbalah) Saul uses each of his family members to deepen his own religious sense (an act finally uncovered by Aaron near the film's end).