The wonderful feature film Akeelah and the Bee is about friendship, community, achievement, and love. If I had enough money, I would give multiple copies of this movie to every single educational institution in the world. I can’t give away that many DVD copies, but I can give a few and so can you.
“Akeelah Anderson can spell. She can spell better than anyone in her school in South Central Los Angeles, and she might have a chance at the nationals. Who can say? She sees the National Spelling Bee on ESPN and is intrigued. But she is also wary, because in her school there is danger in being labeled a "brainiac," and it's wiser to keep your smarts to yourself. This is a tragedy in some predominantly black schools: Excellence is punished by the other students, possibly as an expression of their own low self-esteem.”
-- Roger Ebert
We see Akeelah as she struggles to get by in school. She’s never missed a spelling word, although she doesn’t study, but she does love words. She plays Scrabble on her computer. Her dad also loved words. He died when she was six, and now five years later she feels closer to her dad than her mother, a single, over-worked mom trying to raise a daughter with her own baby, Akeelah and her gangsta-wannabe brother.
This is a movie with relationships and my favorite one is between Akeelah and her best buddy, Georgia. Georgia is always supportive and she has dreams of her own. She wants to be a flight attendant. She is unwavering in her encouragement of Akeelah, and Akeelah repays with encouragement and support in kind. When Akeelah is invited to a birthday party for a fellow spelling bee contestant in the prestigious Woodland Hills area, Georgia goes with her. At the party, however Georgia refuses to get out of the car and instead chooses shopping at the mall. She knows she doesn’t fit in with Akeelah’s new friends. As Akeelah gains notoriety and becomes a local celebrity, Georgia sees Akeelah less and this saddens her, but she never fails to offer encouragement. They remain friends . . . and Georgia will probably grow up to be a flight attendant.
Throughout the movie, the characters never take the easy way out. There are so many clichés that could have been easily applied. They weren’t.
Akeelah meets every challenge with determination and pluck. She chooses her own path from forging her permission slip, to skipping a tutoring session, and to misspelling a word on purpose. She makes decisions and suffers the consequences.
Akeelah and the Bee is a movie that deserves to be shown over and over again to young people, old people, friends and strangers as well. Share the experience with your neighbors and students. Support your local schools at every opportunity. Now, that spells success.
Success: Can You Spell That Without Any S's? - To learn more about this author, visit Don Doman's Website.
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