Description

See Ulee’s Gold (1997), the best and least well known movie based on the Odyssey. It was written and directed by Victor Nuñez. Ulee Jackson (Peter Fonda) lost all his friends in combat in Vietnam.  In the Florida panhandle of the Tupelo swamplands, Ulee ekes out a livelihood from his ancestral trade of beekeeping. Nuñez’s camera focuses on Ulee as he performs backbreaking daily chores — working at the hives, repairing wooden crates, and moving barrels of honey. In a sense this Odysseus is more of a Laertes, retired to his small-holding, especially since his wife Penelope died several years ago.

Ulee struggles to raise his grand-daughters, Casey and Penny, abandoned to his care after his daughter-in-law — Helen — vanished two years previously (she is hooked on heroin and staying with lowlife criminals in Orlando). Their father, Ulee’s son Jimmy, is in prison serving a sentence for armed robbery after taking to crime during his father’s absences.  There is a confrontation between Ulee and the criminals, who take a suitor-like role in invading his house and taking the womenfolk captive. Ulee finally rouses himself from his depression and takes violent action to save his family.  The film realistically evokes a deprived family, and the realism is not compromised by the mythic authority lent by the parallel with the Odyssey.