Gifted filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel have directed three features over a dozen years: the unsettling Suture (1993), the less experimental but disturbing The Deep End (2001), and now Bee Season, based on the well-reviewed novel of the same name about a dysfunctional family—the father’s a demanding professor of religious studies whose tight grip on the family induces the mother’s fetishistic stealing and the son’s attraction to a cult. The directors exercise their stylistic flourishes mainly in the imaginative sequences depicting the young daughter’s trancelike state while she conjures up the correct orthography in the spelling bees her father’s determined she must win, and while the film observes the same heartbreaking obsessiveness as the popular Spellbound, it has none of that documentary’s cuteness. The parents, though physically unattractive in the novel, are incarnated by Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. PG-13, 104 min.
