It's a little disconcerting to hear Jerry Seinfeld's voice coming out of an animated bee's mouth, but after a few minutes of Bee Movie, you'd swear you were watching Seinfeld. Well, not exactly. But the remarkable thing about Seinfeld's latest endeavor is that despite an unsettlingly optimistic outlook and an "all-life-is-sacred" attitude, the comedian has remained true to his roots and given us a movie that is, effectively, about nothing.
Admittedly, the film does have a plot: after graduating from college and realizing that he's only going to get to do one thing for the rest of his life (sound familiar, anyone?), bee Barry Benson (Seinfeld) decides to venture outside the hive. On his sojourn into the land of the humans, he befriends Vanessa (Zellweger), a florist, and after discovering that people actually steal and eat the honey his species strives so hard to make, he decides to sue the human race. But this mildly entertaining premise, which fizzles into plot points that can only be described as cop-outs, is not really the point of Bee Movie.
The point, it seems, is for Jerry and his stellar cast of fellow comedians to make Seinfeld-esque observations about contemporary American society. The film is rife with pop culture references, from jokes about TiVo to a hilariously parodied scene from The Graduate; these nearly constant comic jabs at the way we live are what sustain the movie till the end, long after the plot has abandoned ship (or hive, as the case may be). Though he has donned black and yellow stripes and strapped on a stinger, Jerry Seinfeld is still Jerry Seinfeld. And throughout Bee Movie, one half expects him to ask, "So what's the deal with human beings"
