ULEE'S GOLD (59)

Directed by: Victor Nunez

Starring: Peter Fonda, Patricia Richardson, Jessica Biel

The Pitch: A middle-aged bee-keeper has to look after his young grand-daughters, as his son is in jail and his daughter-in-law a junkie ; but events conspire to force him out of his self-imposed emotional shell.

Theo Sez: It's gotten a lot of heat for falling back on action-movie characters and situations, but in fact it's only when it features some edgy, dirty stuff to play off its introspective hero that this rather tepid drama rises above mere worthiness. The sense of location is wonderful, and there's at least one low-angle shot in which Fonda looks spookily identical to his old man (for what that's worth), and yes, it's good to see a genuine American art-movie, but it's also true that the ending is awful (wasn't the father-son reconciliation enough? was it necessary also to extract a promise from Junior that he'll give bee-keeping a chance?), and that the getting-to-know-you scenes between Fonda and Richardson - all nervous laughs and Significant Pauses - are on the level of a rather lazy TV movie. Interesting more for what it represents than for what it is : unlike (say) with SAFE, it's quite possible to imagine a commercially viable American (and even Hollywood) cinema in which all the "serious" films are exactly like this one - just a bit more tender and more truthful than they currently are, but still easily-digestible and formally unadventurous. If its success can herald a reclaiming of the territory ceded to television (where such films are commonplace, and generally stripped of all nuance) then it's to be welcomed ; even if it's not actually that much of a movie.