Watch Ulee's Gold For Free

Let's be realistic.

Fantastic!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The first must-see film of the year.

The honey that "Tupelo Honey" refers to is not somebody wife or main squeeze. It refers to the honey produced by bees that have been mucking around in the blossoms of the Florida tupelo trees, which only are in bloom for a few weeks. This makes for a high-end honey.The bees kept by Peter Fonda play a weighty symbolic role in this film. They get along, so why can't we? As we all know, bees are divided into classes. First, there is the queen bee. She's fed royal jelly in her блины. Besides the queen bee, or rather beneath her, are the workers, the drones, the soldiers, the Viscounts, the peons, the serfs, the bishops and rooks, and the châtelaines. There are others, many of mixed race, but you don't need to know all of them to enjoy the movie.I think this role earned Peter Fonda a Golden Globe Award and he deserved it. He's all guardedness and reserve. The death of his wife six years ago has left him emotionally bankrupt. His two grand-daughters don't pay him much attention as he goes about the time-consuming business of schlepping bee hives and barrels around the woodland apiary. His son is in the slams for a robbery. Then, reluctantly, he agrees to his son's desperate plea to Fonda to rescue his daughter-in-law from abject distress in Orlando. When they wouldn't let her into Disneyworld she went spastic and has been strung out and in the hands of two really evil young men ever since.Fonda reluctantly drives to Orlando to take her home. The two miscreants happily hand over the strung out woman, having had their fill of her, but they inform Fonda that they were his son's accomplices and they have reason to believe the son stashed a hoard of money from the robbery. They want the money or else they'll pay a visit to Fonda's family. The daughter-in-law, Christine Dunford, is in awful shape. Her performance is outstanding. Fonda enlists the help of a neighboring woman, a nurse, Patricia Richardson, to put Dunford to bed, restrain her, and keep her sedated.Meanwhile, Fonda's demanding work with the tupelo honey is falling behind schedule. At about this point, the story loses some of its sense of abject despair. With the help of Dunford's two daughters and the sensible next-door nurse, things improve. Dunford regains her identity and her daughters gradually warm to her.It's nicely directed too. Fonda has been fiercely independent since he became a widower. But now, coming home sleepless from work in the field, his back killing him, he leans against the kitchen wall. His daughter-in-law asks if she can fix him something to eat. He replies, "A glass of water would be nice." And the director, Victor Nunez, lets us see Dunford turn on the tap, fill the glass with water, hand it to Fonda, and the camera pauses while he drinks the entire contents.The business with the two unsavory robbers continues apace. The dominant of the two, Steven Flynn, does a truly good job of being what he is, carrying around with him a dull glow of foreboding. The director hands him an impressive introduction. Fonda visits the pool hall and Flynn has just made a shot. His eyes follow the pool ball and then slowly rise to stare with a phony smile at Fonda. But he's always polite. Fonda is "Mr. Jackson" or "Sir," even when Flynn is holding a revolver to his ear.It gets more tense as it turns from domestic drama to crime story, which I won't get into except to say that not a shot is fired and no one gets his head wrenched off.Start it and stick with it for a while.

Ulee (Peter Fonda) is a beekeeper who produces some of the finest honey available, Tupelo Gold.While there is some very interesting material on beekeeping, this is essentially a good story about a somewhat dysfunctional family. Ulee is a widower raising his two granddaughters on his own while his son is in prison and his daughter-in-law has run off.The cast includes Patricia Richardson (Home Improvement) as a Nurse that lives next door and a potential love interest for Ulee. While Ulee's eldest daughter is played by Jessica Biel in one of her first film roles , I really appreciated the depiction of a character acting heroically in the face of adversity without resorting to the violence that is so common in many Hollywood pictures.The film was written, directed, edited and shot by Victor Nunez on a very limited budget, but I did not find any such limitations at all obvious in the execution.Features an Oscar nominated performance from Peter Fonda, who won numerous awards for the role including a Golden Globe.

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

"Ulee's Gold" is an allegorical film about Alchemy, which is itself a metaphor for a process of spiritual development. The medieval alchemists famously attempted to turn lead into gold. As they consciously went through the various steps and stages of refining the metal, they would (theoretically) grow spiritually as their inner development mirrored their outer work. The "Gold" in the title refers to the honey Ulee manufactures, as well as symbolizing his family, himself, and the highest potential of all of the above. This film succeeds on all levels. Unlike most metaphorical or allegorical films, the narrative is matter-of-fact and grounded in reality. Here archetypal themes are spelled out in a modern context that requires no suspension of disbelief. The alchemical motif is repeated throughout, illustrating the different stages of the process. Ulee and his family heal by working together in the alchemical process of honey production.In a larger context, the entire tale, from Ulee's archetypal descent into to the underworld all the way to the love flowing amidst his restored family, is itself an alchemical working. The viewer gets to experience what the process is like - the challenge, growth, healing, and love, just by watching the film. "Ulee's Gold" leaves you feeling good. It's a simple film, not unlike an "ABC Afterschool Special", but superbly crafted and highly satisfying.