JULES – Review by Leslie Combemale
With age comes invisibility. How do people struggling with that truth break out beyond it, to make new connections and have meaningful interactions? That’s really the starting point and the emotional touchstone for producer/director Marc Turtletaub’s new dramedy Jules. The trailer and tagline, (“You won’t believe what just crashed into Milton’s azaleas”), reveal the film is centered around how aging widower Milton (Ben Kingsley) handles an alien’s spaceship crashing into his backyard, but the sci-fi element is just a jumping-off point for a funny, poignant tale of friendship and loneliness.
Milton, a mild-mannered small town senior citizen very much minds his own business, with the exception of when he attends the town board meetings and makes suggestions for the betterment of his community. Daughter Denise (Zoe Winters) is the town vet, and she’s worried about Milton’s forgetfulness. First he leaves a can of beans in the bathroom cabinet, then he announces, in public, that an alien has landed in his backyard. Gratefully, Joyce and Sandy, two women of a certain age who attend the same town meetings, are lonely, too. Actually, they’re lonely enough to reach out to Milton, and discover that he indeed does, indeed, have an extraterrestrial as a temporary houseguest. They name the alien Jules.
Playing Jules, stunt performer Jade Quon shows that economy of movement is its own valuable skill, one that allows Jules, who never speaks, to seem like an empathetic listener. Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin, as Sandy and Joyce respectively, are both funny and engaging, with their characters drawing Milton out of his comfort zone in all the best possible ways.
Jules might strike viewers as rather innocuous, but that would be missing the subtlety of the ensemble cast’s performance. The film expresses in a creative and digestible way the notion that those aging in our society deserve more than being cast aside and ignored. Though the message could have been delivered in a more dramatic way, this movie really brings home that when a speechless alien named Jules offers more connection than people living next door, society has a lot of work to do.
3 1/2 out of 5 stars
