Doug Atchison (2006)

Manipulative, dramatically primitive, extremely difficult not to like – too difficult for me, anyway …   It has its place in cinema history too as the film whose big words you spell along to.   The heroine lives in South Los Angeles with her widowed, working mother, her two brothers, her sister and the sister’s little daughter.   Akeelah goes to a middle school whose kids have low educational aspirations and achievements; she’s unhappy and unsettled there – largely because she’s bright and feels she doesn’t fit in.  She’s persuaded by the well-meaning principal to take part in the school’s first spelling bee, which she wins easily.  The shape of the story is a familiar one:  the movie describes the emotional roller-coaster of Akeelah’s progress through the various stages of the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee[1], up to the finals in Washington DC.  Her tutor and mentor is Dr Joshua Larabee, a former head of department at UCLA who’s mysteriously abandoned his high-flying academic career.   The mystery is short-lived:  just as Akeelah’s life was turned upside down by the death of her father so was Larabee’s by the death of his daughter and the consequent break-up of his marriage.  As a teenager, Larabee himself reached the final of the National Spelling Bee.  Racially proud (at one point he quotes the words of Harvard’s first black graduate), Larabee sees in Akeelah a reflection of the adolescent triumph he didn’t quite have and the daughter he’s lost; this testy but humorous figure of authority is also, of course, a father figure  to Akeelah.

It would be kind to describe this kind of plotting as tidy and the way the writer-director Doug Atchison prepares the ground for the later rounds of the National Spelling Bee as efficient – it’s obvious from the start that, although they come from the same region, the main players in the finals will include Akeelah, an eccentric Mexican-American boy called Javier Mendez, who has a crush on her, and a desperately competitive Chinese-American called Dylan Chiu, runner-up in the national finals in both the last two years.   We know Akeelah’s school is under-resourced but the staff-student ratio is alarming:  there seem to be about two and a half teachers, including the ubiquitous principal.  The disqualification of a horror Mom-driven boy in the regional heat, which reprieves Akeelah, is clumsily unconvincing (it’s one of Akeelah’s supporters who unmasks him as a cheat).  When Larabee is first testing Akeelah’s spelling, the word that trips her up is ‘pulchritude’; that’s the word she has to spell correctly to triumph eventually.  (What’s an easy word to spell is a highly subjective judgment but looking at the winning words over recent years of the real contest suggests that ‘pulchritude’ is a much softer option than usual.)

Has there been a decline in American television drama that means this kind of heartwarming moral instruction once again has a better chance of being commissioned for cinema than as a TV movie?   However it came to be a feature film, Akeelah works both emotionally and as the dramatisation of a competition:  Atchison is shamelessly confident.   When Akeelah has to spell ‘pulchritude’ at the end each of the letters is spoken – in her mind and on the screen – by a different person who means a lot to her.  This sounds cheesy but it’s actually a neatly surprising way of delivering the climactic moment.    Akeelah is pleasurable too simply on the level of giving information, in an entertaining way, about the culture and history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which dates back to 1925.  (At Larabee’s prompting, Akeelah learns to spell all the winning words from the first year of the Bee onwards.)  I was interested to see that, unlike competitors on the international Scrabble circuit, Bee contestants are encouraged to learn not just the correct sequence of letters in a word but its meaning and etymological source.

As Akeelah, Keke Palmer doesn’t do anything especially inventive but she’s assured without being irritating – in fact she’s very likeable.  As Larabee, Laurence Fishburne, who also produced, isn’t entirely comfortable with the awkward academic lines he’s sometimes given to speak but his blend of defensive authority and vulnerability makes the role work.  Because he’s such an imposing presence, Akeelah’s peppy impertinence in her exchanges with Larabee is much more engaging than it would otherwise be.  Angela Bassett, who plays Akeelah’s irritable, harassed mother, is a tight, limited actress but she connects in her scenes with Fishburne (these two go back a long way).   J R Villareal plays Javier, Sean Michael Afable is Dylan and Curtis Armstrong the school principal.

Would you enjoy Akeelah in the same way if the protagonists were the white middle-class kids that Akeelah’s friends worry about her mixing with?   Obviously not:  there are certain films whose charm makes you root for the main characters to succeed at something you’d normally despise (Working Girl is an example) – in this case, the competitive ambitions of an eleven year old African-American girl and the teenage sons of Chinese and Mexican families (even though both seem affluent enough) have an edge and appeal.   Besides, the script’s homiletic tendencies require Akeelah, Dylan and Javier, in their different ways, all to question what and how much winning means to them – this is how Doug Atchison manages to keep the final competition suspenseful.   You think surely Akeelah can’t simply win; then wonder how, if she doesn’t win, the film can avoid leaving you disappointed; then laugh at yourself for not realising the obvious solution.  It’s a tie.

10 August 2010

[1]  According to Wikipedia, ‘An insect bee is featured prominently on the logo of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, despite the word “bee” being completely unrelated to the name of the insect. The origin of the word “bee” as used in “spelling bee” is unclear. “Bee” refers to “a gathering”, where people join together in an activity, and the origin of this sense of “bee” is related to the word “been”’.