Ulee's Gold (1997)

Plot: Vietnam War veteran Ulee Jackson comes from a long line of Florida beekeepers. He believes that his and his family's lives are nobody's business but their own. He has been retreating from life ever since the death of his childhood sweetheart wife, Penelope, six years ago. He now lives with his two granddaughters, teenaged Casey and adolescent Penny, as their father/Ulee's son, Jimmy, is in prison for robbery, and their mother/Jimmy's deadbeat wife, Helen, abandoned the girls, Helen's current whereabouts unknown. Despite factors killing off bees worldwide, Ulee has placed most of his energies into his beekeeping business, as bees are still easier to manage than his family. In prison, Jimmy receives news via telephone call from his two shifty friends, Eddie Flowers and Ferris Dooley, that they know where Helen is, she who is possibly in trouble. Jimmy asks Ulee to retrieve her from Eddie and Ferris in Orlando. Upon his arrival in Orlando, Ulee learns that Eddie and Ferris, who do have a drugged out Helen, manufactured Ulee's retrieval of Helen so that he could be a face-to-face messenger to Jimmy. Eddie and Ferris were Jimmy's two associates in the robbery that put Jimmy behind bars, Jimmy who never ratted them out. Eddie and Ferris learned from Helen in her fragile state that Jimmy managed to steal an extra $100,000 in the robbery, and they now want that money, with Ulee, Casey and Penny's safety at ransom. Beyond finding out from Jimmy about the money, Ulee, like everything else in his life, decides to deal with this issue solely on his own. Regardless, he may get some unrequested help from a few people in dealing with his collective life issues, including local sheriff, Bill Floyd, with who Ulee has been on the outs since Jimmy's imprisonment, and nurse Connie Hope, who is new to the area as Ulee's tenant in the house he owns across the street from his own.