Elijah Wood

Performer for Our Time

THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES ANYWAY
(2000)

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The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (2000)
Elijah Wood as "Barney Snow"

Edward C. Patterson, site owner
Annie Graham, copy editor

There are very few equivalents in Elijah Wood’s filmography comparable to his performance as Barney Snow in The Bumblebee Flies Anyway. In many cases, his characters are lost boys, wrestling with circumstances and hormones finding their way in the end. Elijah Wood has said he likes characters that arc this way. With Barney Snow, however, we do not have a lost boy. We have a blank page. And Elijah Wood knows his character so well that he delivers just that when we first meet him.

Although we see Barney in the montage that prologs the action, we first meet the character with his back turned looking out the window. It’s a perfect introduction to a character whose back will be turned on us for a good portion of the film. Unlike such characters as Mikey the Hitman, Jack Dawkins, Huck Finn, Frodo Baggins and Casey (characters that establish themselves as focal points in about 2 minutes), Elijah Wood knows that we know and he (as Barney) knows nothing about Barney Snow. He detaches himself from the character immediately and long before Dr. Harriman advises him to stay detached. He achieves this by accessing the vacuous looks and languid line delivery he used in The Ice Storm for Mikey Carver (a lost boy, but not a blank page). With Barney we also hear—"I am Barney Snow. Will I always know that?" What a strange line. A little later, Elijah manages to put the first building block back into the character, by referring to medication as "merchandise"—a street term. Somewhere on that blank page, Freud slips.

Elijah continues this detached, zombie-like presence through the next few scenes. He is observing and absorbing people and things. Elijah Wood knows that the reconstruction of Barney Snow must be a long, subtle accomplishment. Too much too soon and the thread of the film (he is the thread of the film) will rip. It is a difficult task for an actor. If the character is a domineering one in a film where that character is in every scene, viewers will get bored and leave the story. The same is true of the zombie routine. Elijah knows exactly when to start filling the character out. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway is about Barney Snow. This is not a film about growing up or throwing a ring into Mt. Doom. If the film works well, it is because Elijah Wood works well.

Elijah Wood’s famous penchant for staring comes into good use for the hypnotic scenes, when he goes through treatment. The character emerges a little when he recalls the car crash, a source of excitement. Some bubbly teenage presence flickers, a sign of hope. Once this happens, staying detached becomes a task. Before detachment was inherent in the character. Now that it’s less natural, he can’t stay detached. The fact that Barney is labeled The Ice Man by Billy, is symbolic of how Elijah is portraying the character. The former memories have been frozen behind an ice wall. Now that begins to melt.

Elijah Wood changes tack here. He evolves Barney into a lonely person seeking not only friends, but also family. He has a period of denial.

"Billy’s your friend," Mazzo says.

"I have no friends here."

But after getting Billy the rights to use Mazzo’s phone, Barney bursts into Billy’s room with:

"Billy the Kidney. The Ice Man got you a phone." On discovering that Billy is in his treatment, Elijah gives us the lost look, the one he reserves for disappointment and unexpected surprise.

Emotions. Elijah Wood has drained Barney of all emotion. Now, these return. One of the first is his attraction to Cassie, through eyes and the puppy love face. The next is anger at his own situation and frustration. Rather than yelling at Dr. Harriman, he explodes in the junkyard, throwing a rock, smashing a bottle.

Elijah warms the character to his co-stars. With Billy, he is flippant. With Allie, he shows understanding and compassion. With Mazzo, he is lost for an emotion. He tries flippant, but that gets him:

"You’re gay, right?" Mazzo says. "You get off from watching me sleep?"

"C’mon. What gay guy would want you?"

But ultimately, it’s his growing love for Cassie that has him form a family bond with Mazzo—a quasi-brother bond. Of course, when Mazzo tells him:

"Drop dead."

"No, you drop dead." We are confronted with the awkward dilemma Barney has.

"You scrawny little shit, you pity me."

Is pity love?

Mid-point through the film, when there is enough data grafted onto Barney for him to get a view of himself, Elijah expresses the keynote to character in dialog:

"My mind is beginning to clear. The fog’s beginning to lift. But I’m not anywhere. There’s no landscape. I’m a blank page and the only thing being written on it is people dying."

As Elijah warms the character up and makes him inquisitive, his actions manage to break through Dr. Harriman’s walls of detachment. She adds elements (like Barney’s mother’s picture) to the experiment that Dr. Croft does not endorse (but allows). Here follows the wonderful scene when Cassie and Barney are driving and she tells about her family rift, where her mother is Ice and her father, Fire. The Poem elusion "Some say the world will end by fire, some say ice," and the question of which is stronger, yields the promise that Ice is more enduring. Considering Barney’s nickname, the Ice Man—it is a poignant touch and critical buttress to the characterization Elijah is projecting. I say, project, because unlike other characters that Elijah Wood inhabits, he starts this role outside the character and climbs in. And as he does, we get to see the wonders that he discovers.

"Blab on. I like the sound of it." There’s a milestone in Barney’s development. When one is with family or falling in love, the sound of the voice is the element most desired. Content is sometimes ephemeral. Elijah also rises to the occasion when he defends what has now become his turf (Cassie and Mazzo) from the hypocritical friend (?) in the restaurant.

"I’ll tell Mazzo you said Hi. We’re roommates in the same chronic disease ward."

The pinpoint knowledge that the friend was a bullshit friend emerges from deeper memories. The smart-ass attitude (and Elijah has mastered smart-ass) raises the character up yet one more notch.

Elijah starts a crescendo from this point in the film. He knows that it’s time to do so, otherwise we’d all start cashing in and go get popcorn (if in fact this film ever appears in a movie theater, which it has not. Pity). Mazzo asks Barney to pull the plug. Dilemma one. Can Barney not only build family; can he be family? This dilemma is punctuated with a classic Elijah Wood expression as he sits beside Mazzo and looks askance. We see the same look at Bree in Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo Baggins sits on the bed while the Nazgul destroy the decoys. (The shot is the exact reverse, FOTR he looks right to left. In Bumblebee he look left to right).

Barney also wonders which is longer, the nights or the days. Especially since Mazzo will be undergoing so horrific treatment, Barney fills in the days by building the soapbox car. He also continues to build his relationship with Cassie. In fact, there’s one shot of Cassie outside talking, her body completely camouflaging Barney’s as he stands beside her listening, but hidden. As the shot pans about, he emerges as if from her. He listens intensely—Elijah upping the ante once again, focusing the character like one of his broader, heavier charged roles. Now, Barney is no longer a blank page. He’s a page on fire. More of him emerges. He builds the car, but where did he get the skills? He has the skills as Barney Snow; the real Barney Snow.

Then, the second major dilemma sets in. He discovers the Project’s intent. He sits in the fake car with waves of realization drenching his face. Another (lesser) actor would have exploded into shouts a la Frodo in Moria. But Elijah only bangs the steering wheel and does what Barney Snow, the character he now inhabits, would do—listen and absorb. When he asks Harriman:

"What’s behind the wall?"

"You had bone cancer."

He labels his post-experiment self as "A healthy nobody."

(This experiment brings to mind the one in another Elijah Wood film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although Elijah is not the star in that wonderful film, he sought a part in it, indicating the intelligence at work in that part of his career choice process.)

Now, with two dilemmas roaring, Barney tells Mazzo the truth.

"Go away," says Mazzo. "You don’t belong here!"

"Mazzo. I do."

"Son of a bitch. You lied to us."

"No, they lied to me."

True anger comes to Elijah’s eyes at this point. He then states the dilemma in total:

"If you could let go of your past, to have a future, would you do it? Well, that’s what I did. Now this is my life."

With that line, Barney Snow takes responsibility for his dilemma and takes full control of the solution. He needs to reconcile a past that he wanted erased, with a future that he will not have if the bone cancer returns. It’s a Thornton Wilder moment, like in Our Town when the heroine states we need to cherish every waking moment of our lives because when we live it we take it for granted, but when it’s gone, we ache for an eternity.

When Mazzo and Elijah shake hands, Elijah Wood introduces the word "man" into the script (I’m sure it’s an ad lib). Throughout the balance of his dialog, there is a teenage tonality as if (pop) we finally have the real Barney Snow, no longer the blank page. It is the teenager who started out on this journey only to return full circle to pay the price for his adolescent decision. Now, he is more adult and needs to make a careful decision. But Elijah bids for our hearts by conjuring up the lost boy, the one we did not have at the story’s beginning.

Before the emotional end, there is a love scene between Cassie and Barney, where he extracts his promise from Cassie to recall their relationship if for some reason he should forget.

"Even through the fog I was living in, the memories of you were the most clear. Only you . . . Cassie promise me something . . . if the time ever comes that I don’t remember all this, tell me our story."

Elijah Wood’s kiss and hug sequence is the best he has ever delivered on film (except for all the passionate work he did with Sean Astin in Lord of the Rings.) For some reason, Elijah has never been given the right vehicle for passionate opposite sex love scenes. His Ice Storm and Black & White pokies were limp and the one big sex scene in All I Want/Try Seventeen was limper, although meant to be hotter. His work with Sean Astin was far more passionate, if much less sexual. However, this scene in The Bumblebee is convincing because both actors did their homework on their characters and the beat was correct. The scene comes from the fabric of the story. It works.

As any Elijah Wood fan can tell you, as he prepares for the final departure and the flight of the Bumblebee, he takes a shower, his only naked scene in film to date (although it was only from the waist up). We’ll need to wait until he undertakes a meaty part like Eddie Dean in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series before we get an intrinsic naked woodie shot from Elijah. Despite the fan titillation, the shower scene is meant to purify the character as he has decided to help Mazzo die and also die himself. We don’t know that yet. After this baptism, he walks down the corridors with his eyes closed and his arms out in flight (he would do so again in a later shot). Here his arms are Christ-like, aptly following the baptism.

The Attic Scene which culminates the film is one of Elijah Wood’s greatest performances. Having started with a blank slate, he has explored Barney Snow, developed him, inhabited him and resurrected him. Now it is time to sacrifice him. Although the scene at the window with The Bumblebee recalls the soapbox type flight in Radio Flyer, there is where the similarity stops. The push and pull of Mazzo, Harriman, Billy and Barney weighing the pros and cons of living, its quality and quantity, rivets. His words to Mazzo is the paydirt that we came to see, the results of Elijah’s long crescendo:

"I can feel that wind on your face. Speed’s building up. Let it go, Mazzo. Let it go. Maybe we get a better break next time around. Look at me. I came back in the same life and I got to meet Billy and Allie and Cassie and you. Hold tight pal. Hold tight."

And when Harriman calls for Barney to stay:

"I’m going with him."

"Why? His life is over. Not yours."

"Your way, I lose all of this. Cassie never happened; tonight never happened . . . I didn’t have so much to lose before. I didn't have a family, people I love. I can’t let you take that away from me."

Elijah keeps us guessing until he lets Mazzo go, then raises his arms again, feeling "the wind on his face; the speed building up." It is tour de force "merchandise" calculated to pull any viewer out of his or her own world and into a box of tissues.

In the last scene, we see Barney again, as Cassie arrives to re-introduce him to the memories she promised to safeguard. Barney had invested time in the film writing hints to himself so he would not forget things. He finally learned that the best vault for memories is in other people. As if to punctuate the film with a final cadence, the last time Elijah Wood lets us see Barney Snow, he is a blank page once again. But somehow, we know that page will be filled. He will survive.

My one regret is that The Bumblebee Flies Anyway needs to be discovered by the film-loving world. Elijah Wood’s fans know about it and introduce other fans. But, here amidst a string of excellent work—Casey, Mikey, Frodo Baggins, Sean Sullivan—comes perhaps the most compelling performance Elijah has given us—Barney Snow. And this at the age of 19, shades of the prodigy.