A beekeeper, a family, and a second chance
Ulee’s Gold is Peter Fonda’s finest late performance, and one of the finest performances of his entire career. He plays Ulee Jackson, a Florida beekeeper and Vietnam veteran who lives a life of strict routine: tending his hives, caring for his bees, and raising his two granddaughters, Casey and Penny, while his son Jimmy is in prison and his daughter-in-law Helen is lost to drug addiction. Ulee is a man who has learned to survive by controlling what he can control. He wakes early, he works hard, he speaks little, and he keeps his emotions locked away, because emotion, in his experience, leads to pain and to mistakes. When Helen reappears, needing help, and when Jimmy asks Ulee to bring his family back together, that control is tested, and Ulee must decide whether to remain isolated or to open himself, however painfully, to the people who need him.
Director Victor Nuñez, who wrote the film as well as directing it, sets the story in the tupelo honey country of northern Florida, a landscape of swamps, rivers and orange groves that is both beautiful and unforgiving. The beekeeping is not a picturesque backdrop. It is the film’s central metaphor and its practical reality. Nuñez films the hives, the smoke, the veils and the honey with documentary attention, showing Ulee’s work as skilled, dangerous and patient. Bees sting, hives swarm, and honey must be harvested at the right moment. Ulee’s relationship with his bees mirrors his relationship with his family: both require care, attention and a willingness to accept stings. Fonda, who learned beekeeping for the role, performs the work convincingly, and his hands, weathered and steady, tell as much of Ulee’s story as his face does.
Fonda’s performance is remarkable for its stillness. Ulee says little, and when he does speak it is often in short, practical sentences about bees, about money, about what needs to be done next. He does not explain his feelings, he does not seek sympathy, and he does not perform his pain for the audience. Fonda lets the audience infer that pain from small details: a pause before answering a question, a glance at a photograph, a hand that trembles slightly when it should be steady. It is a performance built on restraint, and it is all the more powerful for that restraint. When Ulee finally allows himself to feel, to forgive his son, to help Helen, and to tell his granddaughters that he loves them, the emotion is earned, and it is overwhelming precisely because it has been held back for so long.
Duty, guilt, and forgiveness
Ulee’s Gold is a film about duty and guilt, and about the difference between them. Ulee feels guilty about his son’s imprisonment, about his daughter-in-law’s addiction, and about his own past as a soldier and as a father. He has responded to that guilt by becoming rigid, by imposing order on his life and on his granddaughters’ lives, and by refusing help from others. The film suggests that duty, while necessary, is not enough. Ulee must learn that caring for his family means more than feeding them and keeping them safe. It means listening to them, forgiving them, and forgiving himself. His journey is not a physical journey, like the road trips of his earlier films. It is an emotional journey, from isolation to connection, and it is filmed with the same patience and attention to landscape that characterised Fonda’s own best directing work.
The supporting cast is superb. Patricia Richardson plays Connie, a nurse who becomes Ulee’s friend and, tentatively, his romantic interest, and who challenges his isolation with warmth and humour. Christine Dunford plays Helen, Jimmy’s wife, with a raw, unglamorous honesty that avoids both sentimentality and condemnation. The young actresses who play Casey and Penny, Jessica Biel and Vanessa Zima, are natural and believable, and their scenes with Fonda, whether they are working with bees, arguing at the dinner table, or simply sitting together in silence, are the film’s emotional core. Nuñez directs them all with a documentary naturalism, using non-professional actors in small roles and real locations, so that the film feels less like a Hollywood drama and more like a window into a real community.
The film’s climax is not a gunfight or a chase, but a series of quiet decisions: Ulee’s decision to help Helen, even though she has hurt his family; his decision to visit Jimmy in prison, even though their relationship is strained; and his decision to let his granddaughters see him as a man who can be hurt and who can love, not only as a provider and a disciplinarian. Those decisions are filmed without melodrama, and their power comes from their ordinariness. Ulee does not become a different person. He becomes a more complete version of the person he already was, and Fonda’s performance captures that subtle transformation with extraordinary sensitivity.
A career-crowning performance
Ulee’s Gold earned Peter Fonda an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, his first acting nomination, and it is easy to see why. The performance synthesises everything Fonda had learned in fifty years of acting: the stillness of The Hired Hand, the road-worn authenticity of Easy Rider, the working-man’s decency of his 1970s genre films, and the maturity of a man in his late fifties who had lived, lost and kept going. Critics praised the film, audiences discovered it slowly, through festivals and word of mouth, and it has since become regarded as a modern American classic, a film about ordinary people that treats ordinariness with respect.
For Past Tunes readers, Ulee’s Gold is also a film about music and place, even though it is not a musical. Its soundtrack, by Charles Engstrom, is gentle and acoustic, built around guitar and folk melodies that match the Florida landscape and Ulee’s quiet life. Its sense of place, of tupelo trees, of swamp water, of bees humming in the heat, is as vivid as any song, and it reminds us that Fonda’s best films have always been rooted in real landscapes, whether the deserts of the West, the highways of California, or the honey country of Florida.
If you have only seen Peter Fonda as Wyatt in Easy Rider, watch Ulee’s Gold next. It will change your understanding of him, and of what a lifetime of acting can produce. Ulee Jackson is not a rebel or a symbol. He is a grandfather, a beekeeper, a veteran, a man trying to do right by his family. Fonda plays him with a lifetime of experience in his face and his hands, and the result is a performance that is both deeply personal and universally moving. It is the work of an actor who had finally, fully, come home.