STINGLESS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Ulee Jackson (Peter Fonda) keeps bees, which may account for the cautious way he moves through life. He is a widower, which surely explains his pensive silences. His son is in jail, his daughter-in-law is in need of rescue from drugs and low company, and his granddaughters, who live with him, require large helpings of love, patience and understanding. All that, doubtless, justifies the bitter flashes that occasionally illuminate his frozen taciturnity.

What's harder to understand is the critical enthusiasm and good grosses that have so far greeted Ulee's Gold. Some of it probably derives from a desire to welcome Fonda back from his long exile on the fringes of moviemaking--B keeping of another kind--and the fact that, in his maturity, he reminds us a little bit of his father. Most of it, though, surely arises from the desire to encourage an alternative cinema of sobriety and humanity in the midst of summer's heavily mechanized silly season. The key moment in writer-director Victor Nunez's film comes when Ulee could pick up a stray gun and blast a pair of bad guys away. He doesn't, and you just know that this austere refusal of the conventionally melodramatic will eventually win Ulee's Gold an Independent Spirit Award.

We, meantime, learn more about apiaries than we really need to know. And are left wondering if some dynamics in the direction, some perversity in the development of characters, some surprises in the story--qualities that animated Lone Star, which so richly filled this slot last summer--would constitute that much of a sellout. Nunez's film neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee. It just drones on.

--By Richard Schickel