Akeelah is always late to class, often skips her homework, and gradually loses her faith in the South Central Los Angeles school system.
The hero of the uplifting spelling-bee drama "Akeelah and the Bee" is no model student, but the girl sure can spell. Played with squinting, lips-quivering resolve by Keke Palmer, Akeelah taps her hip, using rhythm as a mnemonic device to help her rattle off the correct letters. Akeelah's goal, laughed at by her unsupportive older brother and discouraged by her myopic, widowed mother (Angela Bassett), is to work her way to Washington, D.C., and win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Though Akeelah is only 11, she's already hardened by a tough life, and has formed the foundations of an almost bitter doggedness that will surely carry her later in life. This helps her circumvent the obstacles that surround her, but she's also still an uncertain little girl. Good thing she has a patchwork support system to help her out, led by former spelling phenom Dr. Joshua Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), who sees a little of himself in Akeelah, as well as a little of someone else he's lost.
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Larabee trains Akeelah by having her study essays and speeches by great black social advocates, hoping that affixing meaning to the words will help her memorize them, as well as recognize the power that words contain.
A helpful principal pops by to give Akeelah rides to competitions, sometimes without her mother's consent. And then there's her cheery almost-boyfriend, Javier (J.R. Villarreal), who made the previous year's national bee, plans on getting back there again and believes Akeelah will make it as well. She feeds off the energy of the believers, internalizing the support as confidence, of which she needs every ounce she can muster to face down crowds of wealthy white faces.
Akeelah's predictable journey to success and self-actualization bounds with depth and heart. It's a surprise from the filmmaker. The last movie made by writer/director Doug Atchison was called "The Pornographer" (1999), so a family-friendly, feel-good bucket of sunshine such as "Akeelah and the Bee" doesn't seem like the next logical step. Yet Atchison thrives as a storyteller here, incorporating checkpoints from such me-against-the-world, sports-quest tales as "The Karate Kid," "Vision Quest" and "The Power of One" and making them his own as he translates them into the realm of competitive spelling.
The film is possibly inspired by the excellent documentary "Spellbound" (2002), which examines inner conflicts in children who devote their entire being toward practicing for spelling bees. While Akeelah's social and study lives are fairly balanced, her nemesis, Dylan (Sean Michael), embodies the obsessive extreme. Forced into a constant, robotic training program by his domineering dad, Dylan has a near-suicidal temperament lurking behind his steely eyes.
Atchison handles the Dylan-Akeelah rivalry with kid gloves, painting the competitiveness with sympathy and a yearning for connection rather than animosity. One of the greatest lessons Akeelah, as well as Dylan, learns is that no trophy can tell her whether or not she's a winner.
review
Akeelah and the Bee
***
Rated: PG for some language
Cast: Keke Palmer, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, J.R. Villarreal
Writer/director: Doug Atchison
Family call: It's a splendid family film.
Running time: 112 minutes
Opens Friday at: Park Place, El Con, Century Park, Foothills, Desert Sky, Cinemark
