'Secret Life': It's Worth Discovering

Laid on as thick as honey over corn bread, and just as sweet, "The Secret Life of Bees" will cloy or delight, depending on your blood sugar level and your tolerance for syrupy sentiment. Against the backdrop of the civil rights struggle in mid-1960s South Carolina, this anachronistic tale of female empowerment, redemption and racial tolerance (based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd) views the Old South through the lens of today's social consciousness.

"Ah killed mah mother when I was 4 years old."

That line, spoken in a plausibly drawling voice-over by Dakota Fanning as the film's 14-year-old heroine, Lily, opens the film. It also sets the movie's slightly overheated tone. I'll say one thing, though: A curtain-raiser like that certainly does get your attention.

It isn't long after that opening flashback scene that the now-adolescent heroine finally decides she's had enough of her abusive father (Paul Bettany, having traded in his tweedy English reserve and stiff upper lip for a wife-beater T-shirt and flaring nostrils). He's the one little Lily was actually trying to shoot, all those years ago. And considering that he disciplines his daughter by making her kneel for hours in uncooked grits that he's sprinkled on the floor, the only question is: Why did it take her so long? Just looking at her bloody knees hurts.

Accompanying the lily-white Lily on her journey is black household servant Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), a fugitive from some scenery-chewing bigot who has threatened to kill Rosaleen for sassing him while trying to register to vote. He's already beaten her within an inch of her life. What a pair she and Lily make, traveling through the Deep South at the height of black-white tension.

Let the healing begin.

And begin it does, almost as soon as Lily and Rosaleen hit Tiburon, the magical little town Lily has chosen to escape to -- based on nothing other than a hunch that her mother may have once visited there. (Hold that thought. You'll need it later in the movie.)

Once in Tiburon, Lily and Rosaleen are taken in by August Boatwright (Queen Latifah), a kindly earth mother and honey magnate who lives with her sisters June (Alicia Keys) and May (Sophie Okonedo) in a Pepto-Bismol-colored house. Under August's tutelage, Lily begins learning the secrets of the honey business. Lesson No. 1: Bees, just like people, need love.

Lesson No. 2? Someone's got to suffer, before happily-ever-after kicks in.

Remember Ol' Flaring Nostrils? Turns out he isn't as dumb -- or as bad at map reading -- as he looks. And what of the budding ebony-and-ivory romance between Lily and August's young apprentice, Zach (Tristan Wilds)? Oh, and let's not forget that line that opens the film either. Lily's still got some serious mother issues to work out.

Although the film (adapted for the screen and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood) revolves around Lily, August is the film's emotional center, and Queen Latifah's wry sense of gravitas anchors it. Keys isn't given much to do except look like she's posing for an album cover, but Okonedo's face is a marvel. Every thought, every emotion, flickers across it like clouds obscuring the sun.

Through it all, Fanning more than keeps up with the big girls, especially given the fact that her character, an aspiring writer and the film's narrator, is saddled with most of the film's self-consciously precocious dialogue. Maybe it's something in the water down South. Lily talks like "To Kill a Mockingbird's" Scout, after five years of therapy.

The Secret Life of Bees (110 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for brief crude language, some violence and disturbing thematic elements.