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Review: Once I Was A Beehive (B)

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beehiveOnce I Was A Beehive is an oddity.  In an age where females characters in mainstream movies are absent from their own DVD covers (or just literally absent), here we have a new LDS film where the cast is 90% female.   And the story doesn’t center around whether the main character can find a boyfriend!

Written and directed by Maclain Nelson, Beehive takes a diverse collection of girls, many dealing with emotional or personal issues, throws them into the outdoors where there’s rain and wild animals (and NO cell phones or texting), and lets them attempt to get along with each other.

Once I Was A Beehive does a lot of things right– it’s a sweet story about girls with different backgrounds bonding together that viewers won’t need double-X chromosomes to appreciate. 1I almost said “short and sweet” but it’s not THAT short.  At 119 minutes, it actually could use a little bit of trim.  But still sweet, nonetheless…  Once I Was A Beehive was released on August 14th, and is now showing in local theaters.

Lane is a relatively normal 14-year-old whose biggest complaint is that her family drags her on a camping trip one weekend every month.  Her dad is the type of guy with a “Jesus was a liberal” bumper sticker and who believes time outdoors with family is the time of greatest spiritual renewal (certainly more so than sitting in a church building).   After her dad dies suddenly and her mom remarries a Mormon guy within a year, Lane’s life is in complete turmoil.  Will a week at LDS Girl’s Camp with her Mormon cousin and church-mates help heal the wounds?

Writer/director Maclain Nelson isn’t a young woman (nor would I imagine old enough to have YW daughters) but he and his producers have compiled a collection of experiences — “thousands” of them according to the production notes — from real Girls Camp attendees and synthesized their experiences into their fictional story.  Nelson — most well known for being Elder Propst in The Saratov Approach — is also young enough to be plugged into the modern environment in which current young women and men are growing up.  Once I Was A Beehive contains some clever dialogue and off-the-wall jokes about modern pop-culture which adds to the movie’s flair.   (I liked the meta-joke about the recent Russell Crowe Noah movie that many Church members pretend doesn’t exist.)

The heart of the movie isn’t pop culture jokes though, but how a diverse set of girls (by background, social class, and body-type) learn to grow together as sisters.   We have some “Molly Mormon” types, some ‘non-conformists’ (at least by LDS standards) and some with psychological disorders and/or self-esteem issues.  All of them come together in the end in heart-warming fashion.  The three YW leaders are also effectively written as different personalities who openly don’t agree on the best methods to plan and run activities, but are still unified in their goal to support and nurture the young women.

Once I Was A Beehive has a spiritual layer, but Nelson and company are careful not to make it overbearing.  Faith and prayer are discussed but no one gets baptized at the end.  Lane makes a spiritual connection with the other girls that presents new ideas for her to ponder, although I liked that the other Mormon girls specifically thank *her* for accepting them and being their sister, rather than just the reverse.

On the downside, the film contains too many characters to provide meaningful characterizations (One girl has “boy-crazy” as her only character trait, for instance.  Another is noted to only be at girls camp because her parents forced her, and the movie seems to forget about her entirely by the end.)  The movie also suffers from “unnecessary narration syndrome” — where too much voice-over is used to tell us about the characters and narrative instead of showing us through dialogue and action.

With one exception, Nelson and company do not delve into any darker or ‘controversial’ issues that occasionally rear their head at LDS Girls Camp (bullying, or unsafe/irrational rules on modesty, for instance…)  The exception is the presence of the bishop, who has absolutely no role to play at the camp nor in the movie.   The subtext being the Church still does not allow “girls only” activities where the YW leaders can run their own show without a male present.  2Also, the activities and props prepared by the fictional YW leaders in Once I Was A Beehive would be literally impossible to duplicate in real life based on the meager activity budgets that YW leaders have to work with.  While I’m sure most YW leaders will greatly appreciate this film, some of them may be frustrated at the implicit message that this is what “leaders who REALLY care” do to prepare for Girls Camp.

Those are minor issues in the end — Once I Was A Beehive is a good, heart-warming film that will specifically appeal to young women and their leaders but isn’t limited to them. 3Compare to a film like Austenland, for instance  Even you aren’t in the targeted gender or age group, Once I Was A Beehive is worth checking out.

Final Grade: B

Other Assorted Notes and Comments:

1. It’s great that “boy issues” don’t form a major part of Beehive’s narrative, but that makes the “#Itookaboytogirlscamp” hashtag as part of the Beehive marketing campaign somewhat mystifying.  Unless it’s meant as a meta-reference to inviting men and boys to see the film itself (considering the movie is obviously aimed at women and girls) that phrase has no relevance to anything that happens in the story, and suggests a completely different movie with altogether different hijinx.

2. For a movie that’s entirely about girls/women and their relationship with each other, it’s a little surprising that the biggest relationship hole appears to be between Lane and her own mother, and that the movie never addresses this.  4There’s a joke that the difference between ‘girl’ and ‘guy’ movies:  ‘girl’ movies always feature at least one tense, emotional encounter between the main character and her mother, while ‘guy’ movies feature at least one tense, emotional encounter between the main character and a red, digital readout counting down to zero.  After her dad’s death, Lane’s mom appears to jump immediately into a rebound relationship without EVER having a conversation with her daughter about how Lane feels about it, until the day before the wedding (?).  (That’s, uh…not how you kickstart a successful step-family.)

Even more mystifying, after the family blow-up, it’s Lane (!) who maturely seeks out her mom to resolve the issue rather than the reverse.  (Her mom is absorbed in her cell-phone, and shows no sign she cares how her daughter is feeling.)   They never have a follow-up conversation at the end of the movie — a strange omission.   That would be interesting to know if the filmmakers intended the mom to be a deliberately selfish and self-absorbed character, someone dealing with her own significant emotional baggage from her first husband’s death (and that Lane would have to accept, amidst her own baggage), but the lack of resolution makes her character surprisingly irrelevant to Lane’s story.

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