Ben Kingsley, who likes to go to extremes, has played his part of scowling overcivilized repressed geeks and also his part of raging walking maniacs. But for all Kingsley's deft range of light and dark, it's still rare to see him take on a character as painfully mild-mannered as Milton, the small-town geezer he plays in "Jules."
Milton, 78, lives alone in a beautiful dark-shingled house in Boonton, Pennsylvania. In the opening scene, he takes one of his long, slow walks around town, then stands at the open mic outside Boonton City Hall, where he suggests changing the town's motto from "A Great Place to Call Home" to “A great place to refer to as home.” He's that kind of harmless eccentric goofball with maybe a screw or two loose. The following week, he attends another city council meeting, where he stands up and says the exact same thing.
Director: Marc Turtletaub
Writer: Gavin Steckler
Stars: Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, Zoe Winters
Milton, with his tousled gray hair and plastic aviator frames, old-fashioned plaid shirts and open sweaters, with a blank, puzzled look (he looks like he hasn't smiled in 40 years), could be losing his wits, or maybe time was always on some kind of spectrum. He spends most of his time watching television, and when his daughter, Denise (Zoë Winters), visits to organize the accounts, he realizes that he has left a can of green beans in the medicine cabinet. . She urges him to see a neurologist.
But "Jules," which comes across as one of those quiet home-grown standalone portraits of The Quirkiness That Is Life, isn't quite the movie it appears to be at first glance. Milton, as a character, is so insipidly locked up, so discontent in his routine, so limited in his curiosity about the outside world that the director, Marc Turtletaub, takes the attitude that he couldn't be all that interesting on his own. . own. So one night, a flying saucer crashes in his backyard.
It's not a very large flying saucer, maybe 20 feet across, that looks like two metal soup bowls glued together. And it's the defining moment of what a bulge Milton is as he greets the sight with a slightly anxious "Oh my gosh," instantly focusing on the main effect of this cosmic event: The spaceship landed on his azaleas and crushed his watering hole! for birds!
A little later, he realizes that an alien, perhaps injured, is lying a few meters from the ship. This is now officially a close encounters movie, although the "joke", for a while, is that Milton is unaffected and unfazed by all of this like he is by everything else. When he tells a supermarket cashier, matter-of-factly, about the alien, he sounds like he's entering the early stages of dementia. And from what we can see, maybe it is. But even if that's the case, he's still an old man with a slip of the mind in the middle of a movie that seems to want to be a stripped-down version of "Cocoon" peppered with a "Being There" vibe.
The alien, rendered with highly effective makeup work by Jade Quon, is a small humanoid creature that looks exactly like every cartoon of an alien we've seen since the 1970s (bald, with dark android eyes and a slight pout of a mouth), and appears to have been carved from white wax. Most alien visitation movies, from "Forbidden Planet" to "E.T.", spend a fair amount of time figuring out what makes aliens tick, but in this case there's not much to figure out. The alien, christened Jules, drinks water and eats apples; she never says anything; she sits on the couch with a sad look, watching "Judge Judy" with Milton.
Simply put, there isn't enough in "Jules." She's a sweet but soggy trifle who's overly pleased with herself, and while you can see, in the abstract, why Kingsley was drawn to playing this character, the movie doesn't do with him what it should have. He doesn't use her relationship with the alien to unravel Milton's inner quality of emotional magic. Jules the alien never becomes a tantalizingly ambiguous figure; she is more like a figure. A pair of town hall addicts and Milton senior citizens, the enthusiastic Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and the embittered Joyce (Jane Curtin), become their accomplices in covering up the alien's existence. They put Jules in a T-shirt that says "I'm not a lesbian...but my girlfriend is", and then a Spuds MacKenzie T-shirt.
Watch Jules 2023 Movie Trailer
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