Secret Life of Bees

I read Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees last year while my wife and I were in England. I'd heard about it over the years, because Kidd's name was well known to me from when I managed a bookstore, but I'd never read it. (I'd enjoyed an earlier book, When the Heart Waits a lot, but found the following book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter too feminist for my tastes at the time.)
Anyway, The Secret Life of Bees has hit the big screen now, and Dakota Fanning is the star. Fanning is one of those extraordinary child actors who seems to be able to take on any role and invest it with an intensity that's beyond the ordinary. She's been in movies (or TV) most of her life; in fact, they've been her life. How's she as down to earth as she seems is quite a miracle. She has the ability to be very ordinary, and yet continue to move us. She even managed to make the nasty movie, Hide and Seek, watchable.
I'm not sure that I'll go and see The Secret Life of Bees. Even though it wasn't one of my favourite books, it left memories behind that I don't particularly want overlaid by a movie version. This has happened a few times, with The Shipping News, The Horse Whisperer, and, worst of all, the TV version of Middlemarch, in which the main role was miscast - at least as far as my reading of the book was concerned. (The main role of the TV version of Bleak House was similarly miscast, but it's all a matter of perception - these actors weren't the way I'd imagined the characters, and they spoilt my imaginative version.)

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

We watched the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape again while we were in Valencia, courtesy of our host’s DVD collection. I hadn’t seen it for some time – think I caught up with in on television once – and was keen to see it again, having had fond memories of its quirky approach and intriguing characters.

Furthermore I remembered that Leonardo di Caprio was very impressive in it. He still is. I don’t know that he’s ever done anything better. Di Caprio, who was only 19 at the time the movie was made, plays a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, and conveys the behaviour of such a person with such ease and assurance that the first time around I thought the actor must have been handicapped himself (not having realized it was di Caprio). Before this, he’d hardly been in movies at all; his acting life was in television in such programmes as Parenthood, Santa Barbara, Growing Pains, and even one episode of Roseanne. After Gilbert Grape he barely looked back, and was a super star within half a decade.

Johnny Depp was thirty when he made the movie, but plays someone who’s presumably in his early twenties. Before this he’d made a number of movies, but apart from one they were nothing to write home about, and he’d had appeared for some time in a tv series called 21 Jump St. The one memorable movie prior to Gilbert Grape was the strange Edward Scissorhands, his first collaboration with Tim Burton. A cartoon story performed by real life actors, it’s an extraordinary piece.

Gilbert Grape is full of scenes that stick in the memory: the husband drowning in a foot-deep paddle pool; di Caprio climbing the water tower; the mother climbing the stairs at the end or coming to rescue her ‘baby’. But a scene I’d forgotten was when the husband, an insurance salesman, tries to sell life insurance to Gilbert, who has just been with his wife, with whom he’s been having a rather one-sided affair. On the whole life insurance, for most of us, doesn’t rank highly on our priorities in life, and it’s the same with Gilbert, who actually thinks he’s seeing the man because the latter knows about the affair. It turns out altogether differently for Gilbert and the audience; like so many scenes in the film things aren’t quite what they seem and take different directions to what we expect.

Lasse Hallström as a director doesn’t usually grab me – his version of The Shipping News was a disaster from my point of view – but in this film he has everything in place. I don’t think he’s ever made another film to equal it.