Akeelah and the Bee a Super Story About Spelling and More

When I was in eighth grade, I won the school spelling bee. It was my third and final shot at it, and I managed to take the top slot, taking home $50 and the promise of a chance in the city-wide competition. I studied diligently; I made it to the second round, when I psyched myself out into thinking "buttress" was spelled with one "t". I'm a pretty decent speller, but I don't think I had what it takes to make it to the national spelling bee. I was getting tired of all those words after just a few weeks; I can't imagine spending my entire eighth grade year focusing most of my free time on learning to spell obscure words. Still, I can understand the attraction and the excitement.

In Akeelah and the Bee, we meet 11-year-old Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer), who lives in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood with her over-worked mother (Angela Bassett) and older siblings. Although she is an intelligent girl, Akeelah hates school and frequently misses class. She seems to be headed for trouble. Then her teacher, noticing the fact that she has never missed a word on a spelling test, encourages her to take part in the school-wide spelling bee, and when that fails to interest her, the principal, Mr. Welch (Curtis Armstrong), coerces her by holding her absences over her head. So despite her love of words - derived from her doting father (Wolfgang Bodison), who died tragically several years earlier - it's a very reluctant Akeelah who participates in the school spelling bee, but she wins easily nonetheless, only to be taken down a notch by Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), a distinguished professor and former spelling bee finalist who begrudgingly agrees to coach her.

As the movie progresses, Akeelah must overcome many different challenges in order to progress in this bee. There's the matter of the words themselves, thousands of them, words whose origins and meanings Dr. Larabee encourages her to learn, beyond mindlessly memorizing words with no thought to their practical value. She must bury her attitude for her lessons, and she has to find some way around the fact that her mother does not support her in her efforts. Beyond all that, as she begins to gain acceptance with the other young spellers, her best friend begins to feel rejected and no longer wants to spend time with her. It's a lot for an 11-year-old to deal with. But there are triumphs, each time Akeelah spells a word correctly in front of a large crowd, and eventually she helps to bring a community together in support of her year-long journey.

It's a fairly typical film about a down-and-out person beating adversity for some sort of personal achievement, into which more and more people are gradually drawn. The movie's focus is primarily on Akeelah, who is spunky, sensitive and studious, but other key players include her mother, whose apparent harshness at the beginning of the film does not prevent her from being a sympathetic character, her principal, who desperately wants some good press for his school so he can get more funding, and her mentor, who is authoritarian and aloof but has a little more heart than we might initially guess. I found Fishburne's presence in this film interesting because he also played mentor to the young chess whiz Josh in Searching for Bobby Fischer, though Dr. Larabee's no-nonsense approach is more like that of Josh's stern other coach, played by Ben Kingsley.

We see Akeelah at all levels of the spelling bee, and the film captures the pressures of these events well. But it's not all grim competition. At the local level, she meets Javier (J. R. Villarreal), a sweet-natured boy who becomes her faithful friend throughout the year. My favorite character in the film, he is absolutely adorable, especially in one scene during which he stalls for time at the state spelling bee until Akeelah, caught in a confrontation with her mother, can make it back to the stage. Also notable is 14-year-old Dylan Chiu (Sean Michael), Akeelah's most intense competitor, who is determined not to walk away with yet another second-place finish.

There's a bit of an after-school special tone to this movie, but that doesn't bother me. An inspiring, family-friendly film about perseverance and fair play, Akeelah and the Bee is s-t-u-p-e-n-d-o-u-s.