Hope and trouble arrive at the same time for Fonda. Dunford shows up in a distant motel, hooked on drugs. She is "cared for" by two career criminals, Steven Flynn and Dewey Weber, who want the 100 grand that Wood went up the river for. Fonda retrieves Dunford, and with the help of friendly neighbor nurse Patricia Richardson, tries to get the monkey off the back of Dunford.
How others will see it. Some of the character turns are so complete that even the well-wishing viewer will notice. (I'll expand on this later.) Some will be vaguely interested in how a beekeeper performs his duties (it turns out that bees are predictable). But most will accept Ulee's Gold as a modest family drama with a moral: you can turn your family around with patience and hard work.
How I felt about it. This was a brief career comeback for Peter Fonda of Easy Rider fame. He won a best actor Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category. It is ironical that Fonda, who once epitomized the counter-culture, here plays a hard-working square who values family above all. But thirty years has a way of changing things.
Fonda consolidates his family. But he gets a lot of help. Once Dunford has finished her cold turkey, it turns out that she's a really nice person who again becomes close to the daughters she abandoned. She even looks forward to Wood coming home from prison. Wood, himself, who once hung out with the worst crowd, is now all humble and only wants to help Fonda with his beekeeping. And Jessica Biel, who hated her home life and wanted only to hang with her loud-music-playing boyfriend, has apparently dumped the jerk and become the model granddaughter, daughter, and older sister. And it gets better: single and clearly interested Patricia Richardson stops by, even after she's helped exorcise the drug demons within Dunford. The only ones who haven't changed are reliable workhorse Fonda and halo-bearing Zima.
It all goes smoothly except for the hometown bad seeds, Flynn and Weber, who led "innocent" Wood away into a life of crime and now have come back for the 100K Wood has squirreled away and hidden from both his "buddies" and the law. This leads to Cape Fear-style drama, which goes rather badly for Fonda until the obligatory happy ending puts things right again.
The problem with my cynical assessment is that Ulee's Gold is better than its story and characters deserve. Credit for this must go to obscure writer/director Victor Nunez, who is apparently better at making films than financing their productions.