Juliette Binoche is beautiful. Richard Gere is beautiful. The boy and girl who play their progeny are beautiful. And as the opening shot helicopters in over the Golden Gate at its most picture-postcard, the Bay Area is beautiful. Check that: it's gorgeous—to the point where you can practically hear the phones ringing at Berkeley Hills Realty with the calls from out-of-towners.

Such a glorious sight announces that Myla Goldberg's dark 2000 novel about the middle-class Naumann family, beset by the unholy quartet of noncommunication, Kabbalism, kleptomania, and puberty, has become, as they like to say, a major motion picture. And a pretty good one, too, especially the last thurd, in which a national spelling bee helps all the family's quests, failings, and plain-Jane realitites fall into place.

That everything looks so sweet, though, may seem at odds with what Bee Season's many readers saw screening in their minds. Goldberg's novel takes place in a more dreary locale, which was appropriate, since the story has the fascination that comes from watching a train wreck: reading the novel was like meeting up with an old friend who represented all your bad potential, the kind you keep in touch with just to see what you might have become if you'd made some different choices. Moving the Naumanns out of Norristown, Pennsylvania, into sunlit Berkeley can't help can't help but change our view of them

Adaptations can be dangerous (see Adaptation), and adapting Bee Season for the creen was bound to be tricky in the same way it was for, say, Naked Lunch and The English Patient. That's because Goldberg—like novelists William S. Burroughs and Michael Ondaatje, respectively—tells her story mainly through her charactrs' thoughts. David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), while daring, never could escape from its carnival freak show surface to convey the bald and awful depths of Burrough's 1959 novel. Anthony Minghella's 1996 Oscar-winning version of The English Patient did pierce the surface, carefully spinning around Ralph Fiennes's character a series of vignettes (Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews stealing an impossible life during the craziness of war; Kristen Scott Thomas trapped in a cave, her falshlight and her life fading as Fiennes struggles to get back to her) that allowed the characters to convey their own amalgams of love, loss, and regret.

Bee Season strives for English Patient-style weight and will surely leave some audience members reaching for the Kleenex. The directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, fight like mad to let us in on what Saul, Miriam, Aaron, and Eliza are thinking—a difficult task, since the Naumanns keep just about everything they should talk about inside and are so self-absorbed they'd never notice, let alone comment on, what's going on with anyone else.

Former San Franciscans McGehee and Siegel are no strangers to conveying the thoughts of recalcitrant characters. Their last film, 2001's The Deep End, traced a normal-seeming mom's descent into thievery and killing to cover up a murder she thinks her son committed near Lake

McGehee and Siegel changed the setting, I think, to help us feel something more than morbid curiousity for characters who were engrossing mostly because you wondered how bad things could get. The bright Indian summer of Berkeley and Oakland offers the space and light to suggest that the Naumanns are not screwed up in an alien way—that they might, in fact, be like us. Seeing the family out in the sun, zipping along in their Volvo wagon (in the novel they did nothing as a family) gives us the chance to buy into the movie's more-positive-for-all ending.

The East Bay's glow extends to the movie versions of the characters. In the novel, Saul is a cantor who takes care of the house and kids; Miraiam is a lawyer who brings home most of the bacon while wearing very, very sensible shoes. The closest Gere has ever come to looking like a despereate middle-American husband though, was when he was killing Diane Lane's lover in Unfaithful. So here, Saul is still Jewish, but now he's a college professor who dreives an Alfa Romeo convertible, and Gere looks like he did when he was dating Cindy Crawford, with tight jeans and lots of hair. Meanwhile, the unsexy, uptight Miriam has become the lovely Mimi. She's still obsessive-compulsive and a neat freak, but her actions often seem to come out of nowhere, victims of a script filled with poorly realized motivations.

And that's a bummer for fans of the novel, because the book meticulously traced how the smallest actions can swell into big traumas. Eliza's terror of knocking on her father's study door looks in the movie more like kid-typical hesitation than the novel's serious dread, which said so much about this father-daughter relationship. More alarming, the event that pushes Miriam over the edge, her daughter's uncomprehending reaction to the gift of a kaeidoscope central to her mother's own childhood, is handled so quickly that filmgoers might wonder why the scene is even there.

In some cases, though, Goldberg's descriptions benefit from the cinematic treatment, such as when the film shows how Eliza envisions the words she's tasked with spelling. As your own skin goose-pimples, you can't help but feel the hope she places in her powers of perception. Flora Cross's quiet yearning feels just rght for a child who wants to have a loving realtionship with two parents who aren't exactly Ozzie and Hariet.

And Eliza's older brother, Aaron (played by Anthony Minghella's son, Max), feels more realistic now. He isn't a pale, lonely target for bullies anymore, and because he's not such as disaster, his pursuit of religious awakening seems more believable. Admittedly, converting the book's kindly spiritual dude, Chali, into a young woman played by the fetching Kate Bosworth will probably do for Hare Krishna membership what the cinematography will for Bay Area real estate, but it makes more sense that a kid would disobey his overbearing father for a romantic fantasy

If this were 1973, maybe Bee Season could have made the leap from page to screen with its grit intact. But in 2005, the multiplex demands light at the end of the tunnel. You'll likely enjoy the lighter and brighter Bee Season more if you're coming to the story fresh. Either way, the movie has a lot to offer as it chases four flawed but sympathetic souls desperately trying to make everyting better and whole. And at least they live in a beautiful place.