A brilliant film that helped define a genre

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This was an okay movie, very low key, helped but along by Peter Fonda who is just exceptional. He plays Ulee, a reserved Florida bee keeper forced to put his splintered family back together when his incarcerated son asks for a favour. Solid acting all round with some powerful scenes between Fonda and Patricia Richardson (Home Improvement). It's a low budget movie but that doesn't seem to affect anything. The quiet beekeeping scenes are beautifully done. (I even learned a thing or two about honey there) Also includes a (very) young Jessica Biel as Ulee's granddaughter. 8/23/14

Among other attractions, this film gives Peter Fonda the best role he's had in years. I would wish him a few more opportunities like that one, in short order. The best of luck to him. The workday that Ulee spends with his younger granddaughter, his explanations to her about beekeeping, help the audience understand what's going on. And the granddaughter's lectures to the doped-out mother draw a parallel between the integrity of the hive and the mother's re-entry into the family. Also, this movie has a lot of common sense about action sequences. When Ulee was attacked by the two vicious punks, things would have gone horribly wrong if he had turned into Steven Segal and started kicking people through the walls, turning it into an action epic. It would have ripped the fabric of a very realistic story. He outsmarts them instead. He traps the more vicious of the men behind a door and holds his weight against it, while he talks the less stupid one into calming down. Believable. And the same for the resolution at the end. Not a Hollywood feel-good, "everything's OK now" fadeout. But the psychos are incarcerated, Ulee's son has reason to feel optimistic about parole, and the family members are talking to each other. The daughter-in-law may even stay dried out.A very good film, deserving of the widest possible distributioncm

Peter Fonda as Ulee did his best to recreate his dad Henry in this film, and was nearly as effective as Henry would have been in the same role. Peter does not have Henry's fiery blue eyes that displayed an inner fierceness that belied his outward calm so Peter, with his mother's looks and his very laid back personality, has to work harder(without appearing to do so) to have a similar Fonda impact but he did it so well here and better than I thought he could. This role was a perfect fit for him and he was terrific in it, and he is a credit to the great Fonda name as a result. Ulee's Gold might have been a Oscar instead of the honey he made as a bee-keeper(Peter was nominated but did not win).As a reclusive and introverted Viet Nam vet with a painful war disability, an extreme family dysfunction, and a declining but backbreaking bee-keeping business that's rapidly facing extinction, Ulee has a lot of hard work and stress interfering with his taxing efforts to just get by from day to day. When thrown into a deadly family crisis caused by his criminal and convict son, he reluctantly gets deeply involved in trying to solve it and almost gets killed for it.Many viewers may think this film was paced too slow, but most filmmakers trying to portray a rural story set in the South get the pacing all wrong, as city boy filmmakers never understand why Southern folks move slowly and seem to think slowly, thereby appearing stupid and/or lazy, so they try to speed up the story and ruin it by doing so. I was a country boy early on and understand that carefully-paced, oven hot-country behavior very well and was pleased that Ulee's Gold was paced just right, which to me was the critical factor in making this film believable, along with the spot-on acting of the lead characters.Pat Richardson of Home Improvement was terrific as the helpful tenant/eventual love interest, as her character's basic human goodness, calmness, and sweet motherly nature showed again an example of perfect casting, as that is Pat.See this good story with lots of tension and realistic Southern pacing, and great acting in the leads. Plus, very interesting visuals of bee-keeping details made this one of my favorite films set in the South.For other great films set in the South, see The Trip To Bountiful, Places in the Heart, and Sling Blade.

Since this film is from a regional independent director, typically it will tend to stride away from Hollywood norms. Allow me to quote the author of CInema of Outsiders-- Emanuel Levy, "Highbrow critics continue to complain about Nunez's restrained, unexciting film approach, and, indeed, its easy to overlook the qualities of Ulee's Gold in today's over-hyped market... Ulee's work is silent, repetitive, and undramatic, and so is the film." So, perhaps the reason that this film seems slow is because Nunez purposefully directed it that way. A good taste of regional independent cinema.