Big Picture Big Sound

Honey Coma

"The Secret Life of Bees" is this year's "The Kite Runner," and that's not a compliment. The latter is a best-selling-book-turned-movie that was a shoo-in for Oscar love before eager fans actually saw it; once they did, many were left cold by the ambush of symbolism and shameless ploys to cleanse the tear ducts. The same can be said for the former, which is likely to pay the price for its heap of manipulations.

Based on the venerated 2002 novel by Sue Monk Kidd, "The Secret Life of Bees" tries so hard to be earnest and affecting that it does little but annoy. Writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood, who previously slam-dunked with the romance "Love & Basketball," can’t elevate the film beyond its treacly, after-school-specialness--and a wide-eyed Dakota Fanning spewing platitudes in a high-pitched whisper doesn't help matters.

The no-longer-a-little-kid actress plays Lily Owens, an emotionally wounded teenager growing up on a South Carolina farm in 1964. With her father T. Ray (Paul Bettany) getting drunker and more abusive by the minute, she decides to skip town to find answers about her long-deceased mother. She heads off with caregiver Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson of "Dreamgirls" fame), who was arrested after being attacked by a few local racists outraged by the Civil Rights Act. Sam Cooke didn’t release the hauntingly beautiful song "A Change Is Gonna Come" that year for nothing.

Lily and Rosaleen, now a runaway and a fugitive, respectively, find a needed new chapter when they meet the Boatwrights, three upscale, black sisters with a successful honey-making business and a shared 20-acre estate. There's nurturing queen bee August (Queen Latifah), who lets the wanderers into their home in exchange for labor; June (musician Alicia Keys), a cynical, snappy girl who won’t marry the man she loves out of principle; and May (Sophie Okonedo of "Hotel Rwanda"), an unbalanced, kind-hearted soul who struggles with the years-earlier death of her twin April. (Yes, the calendar names are deliberate--mom apparently had a thing for spring and summer).

Despite such an outstanding ensemble, the film is painfully ineffective. It all seems false, like a projected stab wound that feels more like a paper cut. Case in point: When Lily says, "I can’t think of one thing I’d rather have than someone loving me," it plays more like a cue for sleeve-sobbing than a genuine wham-pow moment--and the whole movie is like that. "The Secret Life of Bees" stings, just not in the way it intended.