Ulee's Gold movie review & film summary (1997)

“She can just stay gone,” Ulee says. “She's sick, Dad,” says Jimmy. So Ulee drives his pickup truck down to where Ferris and Eddie (Dewey Weber and Steven Flynn) are holed up in a flophouse with Helen, who is strung out on drugs and madness. And he hauls Helen home, although not before the two men tell him they believe Jimmy hid $100,000 from the robbery, and they want it back--or they will come after the grandchildren.

A woman named Connie (Patricia Richardson, from TV's “Home Improvement”) lives across the street from Ulee. She's a nurse, divorced twice, no children. The granddaughters like her, and when they see the shape their mother is in, they drag her across the street to help. Helen needs a lot of help. Sedatives, restraints, the whole detox process. Ulee tries to thank Connie. “It's what I do,” she says.

The elements are in place here for a fairly standard story in which Ferris and Eddie come looking for the money, and Ulee must defend his family, while falling in love, of course, with Connie--while the girls bond once again with their mother. But to look at events in that way would miss the whole purpose of “Ulee's Gold,” which is not about who prevails, but about what Ulee learns about himself.

The movie was written, directed and edited by Victor Nunez, who sets all of his films in Florida and goes from strength to strength. His films include “Gal Young 'Un” (1979), about a backwoods widow's run-in with a con man; “A Flash of Green” (1984), with Ed Harris as a newspaper reporter, in one of his finest roles, and the wonderful “Ruby in Paradise” (1993), with its luminous performance by Ashley Judd.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors; that's why Harris and Judd were so good, and why Peter Fonda here reveals a depth of talent we did not suspect. Nunez is attentive to the quiet in Fonda's nature, to the deeply buried anger, and to the intelligence. There is a situation late in this film that involves a gun, and the Fonda character handles it like a chessmaster, figuring out what the real threat is, and how his opponents will react. Raised on routine movies, we figure Ulee will grab for the gun. Ulee is smarter and deeper than that.