Sometimes there’s just one thing that’s enough to make a movie a lot better than it probably should be. And sometimes that thing is an alien.
Jules stars Ben Kingsley as a man whose life seems to consist of going to city council meetings to plead his case for a variety of pet issues. But then one night a UFO crashes into his backyard, upsetting his azaleas. He does the reasonable thing and calls 9-1-1, but he’s dismissed as a crackpot. After a day or so, he sees an alien has crawled out of the wreckage and is lying on his patio. And so, he does the reasonable thing again, and invites it in to hang out on the couch and eat apples and watch CSI reruns with him.
The first few minutes of the movie made me pretty nervous, with Kingsley adopting an American accent that seemed to be trying to squirm away from him, and the film playing too hard at old people being quirky. But there’s something peculiarly disarming about it, and it all goes back to that alien. The creature stands about four feet tall, with gray skin and a human shape. But it’s the face that does all the work. By which I mean, it does nothing. And somehow, that makes so much difference. It’s expressionless at all times, it never makes a sound, it just looks and watches and eats its apples. Maybe it’s because we project our own ideas onto a blank slate, but this all makes the alien an incredibly soothing presence, and, bizarrely, also makes it very funny.
The movie as a whole is a bit messy, wanting to tell a story about loneliness in old age, the fear of dementia, and a handful of other things, without really giving enough attention to any of them. And without saying more, if you’re a cat lover, you might go in a little bit guarded. But I’ll be darned if there isn’t something to this thing, and it’s all because of that blank-faced alien that you somehow, some way, just kind of want to hug.
