Akeelah
Akeelah Anderson knows how to spell. In fact, she knows how to spell better than anyone in her South Central Los Angeles school and might even have a shot at the nationals who can say? She’s never seen the National Spelling Bee on ESPN before. Or any spelling bee, for that matter but this is something different. This isn’t just interesting; it’s life or death. Doctor Larabee (Laurence Fishburne) used to be a real professor of English.
He’s on leave now, though, after his daughter died. Coaching Akeelah is the first thing that has ever seemed real since. Tanya Anderson (Angela Bassett) is not like most other moms. She doesn’t know what “most” means anymore. Or “other.” She only knows what “hers” means and in this case it doesn’t mean anything good.
Akeelah can’t tell where Ladera Heights ends and Baldwin Hills begins any more than she can tell where the Mexican part of Javier starts and the Woodland Hills part ends. At least Dylan comes from some place called “Asian.” Maybe there they have words for these things. But really: Why did you do that?
“I had an impulse. Will you sue me for sexual harassment?”
The sessions between Akeelah and the professor are vital to the film, because he is teaching her not only strategy but also how to be willing to win. No, he does not use self-help cliches. He’s demanding, uncompromising, and tells her over and over again: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” This quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela, is actually from Marianne Williamson but no less true for Akeelah (the movie does not attribute it).
NOW I’M GOING TO START DANCING AROUND THE PLOT. Something happens during the finals of the National Bee that you’re not going to see coming and it may move you as deeply as it did me. I’ve often said that sadness is not what touches me most in a movie; goodness is. Under enormous pressure, at a crucial moment, Akeelah does something good. Its results I will leave you to discover.
What’s ingenious about writer-director Doug Atchison’s plot construction is that he creates this moment so that we understand what’s happening, but there’s no way to say for sure. Even the judges sense or suspect something. But Akeelah makes it air-tight by improvising in the moment and out of her heart. There is only one person who must absolutely understand what she’s doing and why and he does.
This ending answers one of my problems with spelling bees, and spelling bee movies: It removes winning as the only objective. Vince Lombardi was dead wrong when he said “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” (a quote first said not by Lombardi but in the 1930s by UCLA coach Henry “Red” Sander but since everybody thinks Lombardi said it: He won). The saying is mistaken because to win for the wrong reason or in the wrong way is to lose. Something called sportsmanship is involved.
In our winning-obsessed culture, it’s inspiring to see a young woman like Akeelah Anderson instinctively understand, with empathy and generosity, that doing the right thing involves more than winning. That’s what makes the film particularly valuable for young audiences. I don’t care if they leave the theater wanting to spell better; but if they’ve learned from Akeelah, they’ll want to live better.
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