Flickchart Road Trip: South Carolina
Welcome to the latest installment of Flickchart Road Trip, in which I’m starting in Los Angeles and “driving” across country, watching one movie from each state and posting about it once a week with my friend, who manages a bunch of moving lead providers. The new movie I watch will go up against five movies from that state I’ve already seen, chosen from five distinct spots on my own Flickchart. Although I won’t tell you where the new movie actually lands in my chart (I don’t like to add new movies until I’ve had a month to think about them), I’ll let you know how it fared among the five I’ve chosen. Thanks for riding shotgun!
Even before crossing the border into South Carolina, I knew this state would get the short shrift. That’s because my visit to the state fell during my biggest sports week of the year, as this past week featured both the online draft for my fantasy baseball league and the epic first four days of March Madness. As such, I spent way too much time in sports bars watching college basketball and in my hotel room compiling an imaginary baseball team. For what it’s worth, I drafted a team I like and am still in contention in my March Madness pool.
I did spend some time in Hilton Head, which is just across the border from Savannah, my last stop in Georgia. The two cities connect via some beautiful back roads (US 17, to be exact) that I’d driven on the same Savannah business trip back in 2010. The resort island was a second location in which I spent barely any time on that trip, and even though I don’t golf and haven’t played tennis in years, I got a real sense what it would be like to spend a week there doing those things. The weather cooperated and the breeze off the ocean was pretty damn serene.
Speaking of crossing borders, the other South Carolina site that interested me was the garish and heavily advertised tourist trap known as South of the Border. When I traveled down I-95 back in ’95 for my senior year spring break trip to Florida, billboards advertising this so-called “highway oasis” started hitting us sometime in, oh, Connecticut. Since the sale of fireworks is legal in South Carolina, there’s a conglomeration of stores selling them right at the border between North and South Carolina, as well as an infrastructure (restaurants, hotels) supporting those businesses. The whole thing has a Mexican theme, even though that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I haven’t mapped out where I’ll be on July 4th this year, but I figured, it couldn’t hurt to have $60 worth of harmless explosives with me.
That buzzing sound you hear is The Secret Life of Bees, my South Carolina movie. I wanted to see Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s 2008 film because I was intrigued by the cast and because I’d heard some positive things about it … though its global ranking of 26130 suggests that Flickcharters don’t necessarily agree. It also seemed like a good movie for the first week of spring.
What it’s about
It’s the summer of 1964, just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Dakota Fanning plays a young South Carolina teenager named Lily, who has been living with both her abusive father (Paul Bettany) and the memory of a terrible childhood accident in which she shot and killed her mother while her parents were quarreling. When her nanny Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) is assaulted (and then arrested) while trying to register to vote, Lily liberates Rosaleen from the hospital and takes them both on the run to pursue the mysteries surrounding her mother’s whereabouts in the days leading up to her death. Following clues from a box of keepsakes buried in her backyard, Lily ends up in the town of Tiburon, home to the Boatwrights, a family of beekeepers and honey makers. Lily has been seeing images of bees, so she thinks there’s a reason she ended up with sisters August (Queen Latifah), May (Sophie Okonedo) and June (Alicia Keys). What that reason is remains to be seen, as does how long she can escape her past and keep the harsh realities of bigotry out of her idyllic new home.
How it uses the state
The Secret Life of Bees is South Carolina through and through. A moment early on drives this point home, when Lily traps a bee between a jelly jar and a weathered map of the state that’s hanging on her bedroom wall. Also, the Boatwrights are supposed to produce “the best honey in South Carolina.” In terms of scenery, there’s a gorgeous shot of a period Chevrolet pickup driving along South Carolinian roads at sunset. It kind of left me speechless.
What it’s up against
Before we get to my thoughts on the film, let’s duel it against five other South Carolina movies I’ve already seen, shall we? As you know if you’ve ever added a film to Flickchart using the “By Title” feature, the new movie goes up first against the movie in the exact middle of your rankings. The outcome of that duel determines whether it faces the film at the 75th percentile or the 25th percentile, and so on, until it reaches its exact right place. With five movies, that means at least two and as many as three duels. Here are the films The Secret Life of Bees will battle:
1) Glory (1989, Edward Zwick). My Flickchart: #150/3481. Global: #646. Glory becomes the top Civil War movie for the second state in a row after Gone With the Wind in Georgia. However, this is one I really love rather than just respect. It boils the blood with the best of war movies about soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice for a righteous cause, but what makes Glory so indelible is how it portrays the sharing of that sacrifice. Denzel Washington (in an Oscar-winning performance) and Morgan Freeman burn brightly as free Northern blacks fighting for the freedom of their enslaved brethren, but the unwavering moral certitude of Matthew Broderick as their colonel is equally stirring. Although their regimen is from Massachusetts, the second half of the movie takes place in South Carolina, including the climactic assault on Fort Wagner.
2) The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan). My Flickchart: #620/3481. Global: #1028. If you (like me) were too young to watch The Big Chill when it first came out, chances were you at least knew about it because of its soundtrack. The story of old friends reuniting in an antebellum home in Beaufort after the suicide of their friend (played by a mostly unseen Kevin Costner), The Big Chill featured a killer Motown soundtrack that re-popularized all the songs it featured — at least for a short time. The movie has come to be seen as one of the classic examinations of Baby Boomers facing mortality, but its genuine warmth and upbeat tone keep it from feeling quite so dour. In fact, there’s lots of dancing, laughter, and just enough bed hopping to keep things interesting.
3) Doc Hollywood (1991, Michael Caton-Jones). My Flickchart: #1576/3481. Global: #2689. If you had told me Doc Hollywood was set in South Carolina before I started compiling my list of South Carolina movies, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s not because it doesn’t have a sense of place, but because the South Carolina town of Grady essentially functions as “Anytown, U.S.A.” — and I would have guessed that a hotshot doctor driving from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles would have gotten farther before the script required him to break down and smell the roses. Pixar’s Cars has almost an identical plot, which gives you some indication of how Doc Hollywood hits all the right notes. It’s one of Michael J. Fox‘s better star vehicles.
4) Radio (2003, Michael Tollin). My Flickchart: #2674/3481. Global: #5030. You may be asking yourself, “If Radio is on this list, why isn’t it last?” The answer is simple: It’s not as bad as you think. The idea of Cuba Gooding Jr. playing a mentally handicapped high school football assistant with a penchant for throwing his arms in the air is a lot worse than the reality. As hard as it may be to believe, Gooding actually underplays the title character — he gives him a predictable sweetness with only a small dose of the predictable emotional manipulation. You wouldn’t call it a complex portrayal of the mentally handicapped, but the movie sure has its heart in the right place, and that counts for something. The film is set in Anderson County, S.C., where the man who inspired the movie grew up.
5) The Patriot (2000, Roland Emmerich). My Flickchart: #2939/3481. Global: #1558. As his first of many public meltdowns was still six years in the future, the presence of Mel Gibson has nothing to do with my dislike of The Patriot. In fact, if I had to choose a single actor to personify my feelings toward this Revolutionary War movie, it would be Jason Isaacs, whose malevolent British officer is the kind of scenery-chewing caricature who instantly eradicates all notions of realism. Roland Emmerich does his best to eradicate all other notions of realism in this accumulation of rah-rah hoo-ha. Gibson’s Benjamin Martin is called to Charleston to vote in the South Carolina General Assembly on a levy supporting the Continental Army. His homestead, where a lot of melodrama also takes place, is in the state as well.
First duel: The Secret Life of Bees vs. Doc Hollywood. I’d rather stop and smell the roses than stop and smell the bees. Bee stingers are hard to get out of the nostrils. Doc Hollywood wins.
Second duel: The Secret Life of Bees vs. Radio. Singers Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys and Queen Latifah belong on the radio more than Cuba Gooding Jr. does. The Secret Life of Bees wins.
The Secret Life of Bees finishes fourth out of the six movies.
My thoughts
If I had vetted The Secret Life of Bees enough to realize it was another movie set in the south during the tempestuous and racially charged summer of 1964 — the same setting of my Mississippi movie, Mississippi Burning — I might have gone with my original idea for a South Carolina movie, the frivolous 1989 romp Shag, set in Myrtle Beach. (In fact, there were a couple movies I hadn’t seen set in Myrtle Beach, making me question whether Myrtle Beach movies may constitute an unforgivable gap in my South Carolina filmography.) The segregated south is only one of a couple focuses here, but you get the sense that it exists more as a plot device than the primary thrust of this narrative.
I did end up glad I’d seen The Secret Life of Bees — eventually. The movie starts with a melodramatic and somewhat preposterous occurrence, which is the little girl Lily accidentally shooting her mother while her father is slapping her mother around. It’s not as though something like this couldn’t happen — in fact, accidental shootings in the home are cited by gun control advocates as a key reason we should control guns. It’s Gina Prince-Bythewood’s staging of this scene that makes it unintentionally comical. The movie returns with some frequency to moments of high melodrama that verge on the maudlin, but none of them are fatal to the movie’s potency, and some of them are effective despite maudlin tendencies.
Although there are good performances from the always-reliable Fanning, from three actresses who cut their teeth as singers (Latifah, Keys and Hudson), and from Bettany playing against type in the role of the abusive father (who may have taken the role just to practice his Southern accent), the director of photography is the true star of The Secret Life of Bees. Rogier Stoffers brings crisp colors and deep focus to his mildly stylized version of South Carolina, and it’s easy to get lost in his honey-sweet vision. The actual bee-related stuff is pretty, too, though it ends up more like window dressing than anything thematically important to the story. The theme this story does care about is how to live with the world’s pain — both internal and external — without being overwhelmed by it. It does this well enough to earn a modest recommendation from me.
Up next
I’m making my descent into North Carolina next. “Wait, ‘descent’? Isn’t North Carolina, you know, north of South Carolina?” It is, but I’m watching The Descent, Neil Marshall‘s 2005 horror movie about the dangers of spelunking, especially in caves that contain … well, something not quite human. So, descend I will.