Cinema
Ulee's Gold (15, selected cinemas)
The apian way
Mark Steyn
Picking up his Oscar last week, Jack Nicholson, with a wicked smile, saluted his fellow nominee, 'my old biker pal Fonda'. It was no contest: Fonda's is the kind of performance that gets you a nomination; Nicholson's the kind that gets you the stat- uette. Big and starry wins every time. Fonda has never been that kind of player. Even with Nicholson in Easy Rider all those years ago, he was content to just be. While Jack and Dennis Hopper roared off down the highway, Fonda seemed to be left there in the dust: long, lean, earnestly laconic, looking — even in the middle of a sup- posed 'counterculture' movie — as if he was modelling a statue of his father.
Thirty years on, Ulee's Gold is Peter's premature, B-movie version of Henry's On Golden Pond. Actually, make that a bee- movie version. Peter plays a beekeeper, and the camera lingers as lovingly over his beloved bees in the northern Florida swamps as it did over the loons of New Hampshire in On Golden Pond. Victor Nunez isn't so much an American director as a Floridian one: he's made four films there and in each case the story, such as it is, seems little more than a pretext to examine some aspect of life in his back- yard. In this case, it's beekeeping and honey — not that cheapjack Chinese stuff you get in too many European supermar- kets these days, but the high-quality tupelo honey that Ulee and his bees painstakingly draw from the swamps. That's the gold of Ulee's Gold, and you get the feeling Nunez would have been happy to leave it there, quietly lapping up the lushness of the land- scape and the hum of the bees. But this is a drama not a documentary, so he's had to come up with a plot and thus, as things transpire, out there in the swamp in an old cooler jammed under the seat of a rusting pick-up is quite a different kind of gold. Ulee learned beekeeping from his father, who learned it from his. But times change: Ulee's son is in the state penitentiary, his daughter-in-law's a junkie, his sullen teen granddaughter seems headed the same way, and, at the height of the tupelo sea- son, his son's two asshole thug accomplices show up from Orlando in search of the loot.
The problem with all this is that we've seen it a zillion times before — and, even though the familiar outlines of the crime thriller have been slowed down to fit Nunez's ruminative (at times, comatose) pace, you still wonder why the director's gone to all the trouble of finding a bright, particular setting only to turn it into a play- ground for generic Hollywood dysfunction- al losers. Fonda's performance raises the same question: it's easy to believe in him as a beekeeper, less easy to believe that he has any biological connection with this family of misfits. 'There's all kinds of run- nin', Ulee,' the drug-zonked Helen tells him. 'Your body might have stuck around . . but your heart took off a long time ago.' But it's his body that seems so at odds with the rest of his household. While son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter all look serviceably scuzzy, Fonda, an actor of limit- ed expressiveness, nevertheless can't help but project a sort of innate nobility. Maybe Ulee should have got a blood test.
Ulee stands for Ulysses, though you wouldn't know it. Instead, Ulee stands for anything: the worst humiliation provokes only the same weary, weathered stare. Peter's always had the drooped shoulders and flat-footed gait of his dad, but here he's eased into the wire-rimmed specs, too. It's the classic Henry Fonda role: the soft- spoken loner whose unperturbability is mis- taken for weakness. As his other granddaughter, the seven-year-old Penny, puts it, in her explanation of beekeeping: `You've got to keep calm and don't panic when they sting 'cause they don't mean nothin' by it.' Ulee's family sting him con- tinuously, but he keeps calm and he doesn't panic. This metaphor is all Nunez does to connect up the two halves of his film — the honey and the money — and somehow it's all the more unsatisfying for being spelt out so badly.
Once you settle into it, though, Fonda, the beekeeping and Nunez's direction gradually achieve a kind of harmonic con- vergence. You forgive Nunez the neon signposting of his dialogue: 'Look, you can't stay cut off forever,' the sheriff tells Ulee two minutes into the picture. You for- give him, too, the patness of his plot mechanics — the conveniently situated nurse next door, pleasantly played by America's favourite sitcom mom, Patricia Richardson of Home Improvement. None of these matter because of the soundness of Nunez's casting decision: after years of floundering, Fonda has finally found a milieu and a director even stiller and more deliberate than he is.
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