Richard Williams Not quite movie of the week
In Ulysses Jackson, a taciturn grandfather who keeps bees in the swamps of the Florida panhandle, the writer and director Victor Nunez has created one of the richest movie roles of the decade. And in Peter Fonda he has found the ideal actor. Ulee’s Gold is a film of many admirable parts, but in the end it is about one role and one performance.
The art that Fonda brings to Ulee’s Gold is something only cinema can reveal. How crazy, then, that this year’s Academy Award should have gone instead to Jack Nicholson, his old colleague. What Nicholson does in As Good As It Gets is the kind of acting, all gesture and grimace, that you can see any night in the theatre. Fonda, by contrast, deploys the screen actor’s skill of creating the illusion of intimacy through restraint.
Cinema also offers the potential for a productive interaction between the fictional
character and the actor’s public identity. In Fonda’s case the impact of his performance
in Ulee’s Gold is reinforced by the anonymity of his recent career. As we watch the film, we find ourselves wondering about him, about where he’s been and what he’s done.
And, in one very specific way, our speculation nourishes our understanding of Ulee Jackson.
A Vietnam veteran, Ulee scrapes a living by harvesting honey from bees fed on the pollen of tupelo gum trees, a skill handed down through three generations. ”The bees and I have an understanding,” he tells a new neighbour, Connie (Patricia Richardson).
”I take care of them, and they take care of me.”
No one else does. A failed bank robbery has put his son, Jimmy, in jail. Jimmy’s wife, Helen, is running wild in another town. In their absence, Ulee is looking after his two school-age granddaughters, Casey and Penny.
As he deflects Connie’s offers of assistance, we realise that this is a man so committed to self-sufficiency that he has hermeticised himself. But a telephone call summoning him to rescue Helen and a trap set by Jimmy’s former accomplices propel him into a new
relationship with the world.
Nunez sketches in the Vietnam background with a light touch, but we are left in no doubt that the war shaped Ulee’s adult life, fracturing its sense of continuity. And here is where the echoes of Fonda’s personal history resonate inside the role. We associate him with the anti-establishment mood of the late Sixties, and so an ironic counterpoint plays in our minds alongside the film’s narrative.
All stillness and suppressed anguish, Fonda turns Ulysses Jackson into a role that Clint Eastwood might have killed to play, and there are outstanding subsidiary performances from Christine Dunford as Helen, Jessica Biel (Casey) and Vanessa Zima (Penny). The scenes following Helen’s return, when the girls look on as Ulee and Connie subject their mother to an informal detoxification, are authentically harrowing.
Its spare, piercingly accurate dialogue makes Ulee’s Gold feel like the screenplay
Raymond Carver might have written. ”Now me, I’m divorced,” Connie tells Ulee. ”Twice, actually. No kids, fortunately.” A pause. ”I guess fortunately.” Only the ending, although dramatically justified, comes as a mild disappointment.