ULEE'S GOLD
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A Florida beekeeper foils two petty
hoods while he saves his family. This same plot
could have been a simple--even a bad--crime film.
What makes this better than simple cable fare are
the deep emotional resonance, the textured
filmmaking, and the fine performances. This is a
moving story of what a single man can accomplish.
Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) 7 (0 to 10)
New York Critics: 18 positive, 0 negative, 4 mixed
Ulysses "Ulee" Jackson (played by Peter Fonda) is a beekeeper from a small, sweaty town in the Florida panhandle. He lives with his two granddaughters (Vanessa Zima and Jessica Biel) in what in a nicer neighborhood would be called a "dysfunctional" family. The older granddaughter is a little wild and does not have a lot of respect for her grandfather. Ulee's son-in-law Jimmy (Tom Wood) is in the penitentiary for robbing an armored car. And his daughter-in-law Helen has run off to have a good time, leaving her two daughters to Ulee. Hurt by the most of the people he loved, Ulee has withdrawn into himself emotionally. He relies on nobody and nobody can let him down. He has trained his family to never ask the help of outsiders. Above all he maintains his integrity and his dignity, even at the expense of a backache or two or not meeting his honey production goals.
Then Jimmy gets word from his two partners in the robbery, still free, that they have Helen in Orlando, high on drugs, and they want someone to take her off their hands. When Ulee comes to pick her up, they make clear how they have used her and at the same time tell Ulee that they want the $100,000 of bank money from the robbery that they just found out that Jimmy had and hid from them and the police. Ulee brings home Helen, but finds that she is too much to handle in drug withdrawal and he is forced to ask help of the nurse who rents from Ulee a house across the street from his house. Ulee wants as little help as he can manage, but it is the time of year he needs to give a lot of attention to his business of producing honey.
Peter Fonda has never been the most expressive of actors, but here it works to his advantage playing a man who has retreated into his shell and divorced himself from his emotions. This is being called the best role of Fonda's career, but it may be just a matter of calling for the type of non-emotive acting that Fonda is best at. The entire cast does well with Steven Flynn and Dewey Weber genuinely detestable as Jimmy's two slimy partners.
The film DEAD CALM would have been a standard stalker if it had not included some fascinating scenes of how Sam Neill, as a nautical man, saves a foundering yacht. Just seeing the processes used by an expert makes for some good filmmaking. Though ULEE'S GOLD does not take full advantage some of the most interesting scenes of the film show how Ulee maintains the hives and the discussions of rotating the hives and the various grades of honey. In addition these scenes characterize Ulee as a careful and contentious man who does things a step at a time. His care to repair the hives and to return the bees that have strayed makes a metaphor for Ulee's care for his home. Later his behavior around the bees is his guide for how to handle the two hoodlums who threaten his family. Unfortunately only in certain scenes is it clear what Fonda is doing with the hives. This is not a documentary on beekeeping, but it would not have taken a lot of effort to make the task a little more comprehensible. Though even as it is it does engage the viewer.
Victor Nunez tells a simple powerful story of emotional depth. I rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
,
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews