The movie takes place in the South in the 1960s. It depicts a lot of racial issues and conflicts.
For me, this movie started out interesting, but it lost it's momentum and suspense at the end. After awhile, it got boring, and really started to drag. The movie began with a scene of a husband and a wife having an argument. The husband did not hit his wife, but he was grabbing her. The wife goes for a gun, but she drops the gun on the floor. Then, her four year old daughter, Lily, picks up the gun and accidentally shoots her mother. Her mother dies.
This was a flashback memory of Lily, the main character in the movie. Lily goes on to say, "The only thing I knew about myself is that I killed my mother." Her mother ran away from home for a few months, but came back to get her daughter Lily, and leave once again. The argument the husband and wife had was about her running away.
In this movie, when Lily turns 10 or 11 yrs old, she runs away from her father, with their African American maid, who worked for her father. They run away together after Lily breaks the maid out of prison. The prison actually looked more like a hospital. The maid was injured because she was beaten by racist white men.
Through some circumstances, Lily and the maid became aware of the Calender Sisters, and asked to stay with them at their house. The Calender Sisters are named May, August and June. They are bee keepers and have a honey making business. June is also a music teacher. The sisters are very cultured and educated. Their house is very large, and they own a lot of land. June did not want Lily and her maid to stay with them, but August did. June suspected that Lily was lying about their circumstances. Lily did make up lies about being an orphan, and her father dying.
They asked to stay with the Calender Sisters because no one would take a black person into a hotel, they said. The Calender Sisters were black, and they assumed that they might take in Lily, who is white and the black maid.
The sister named August knew that Lily was actually the daughter of the little girl she took care of for nine years as a nanny. But, we have to wait until the end of the movie to find out that August knew Lily's mother. We believe until the end of the movie that complete strangers took Lily and the maid into their home. I think that this makes the movie less sweet. It was not complete strangers that had compassion on people who had no where to go and no money, but people who knew Lily's mother.
Because August knew Lily's mom, August was able to tell her daughter all about her, and tell Lily that her mom did leave her, but, was going back for her, that she did love her. Lily felt unloved because she was told by her father that her mother abandoned her, and didn't want her. And because Lily's mom died when she was only 4 yrs old, she knew little about her mother.
I felt bad for the father in this movie. The movie did not do a good job of depicting that he was a bad guy. The movie did not have a lot of scenes with him in it, and so I didn't get a good picture of how horrible he was supposed to be. The movie should have showed how bad he is, so I could be more sympathetic to the daughter that ran away. The movie makes her seem selfish for leaving. But, maybe not because she was helping the maid escape from the prison hospital.
First his wife leaves him, then his daughter. He is now alone in the world, rejected by his own family. I read a review on the book the movie is based on, which makes the father seem very mean and abusive. It was odd, I felt worse for the father than the daughter, or the maid, or anyone else in the movie, and I don't think the movie intended for me to feel that way.
