It means well, really....Jules (2023)

Every so often a film comes along that is so well intended, so wanting to tick off the right boxes that it can’t help but fall short. In Jules’s case, it’s a short fall because it really isn’t that ambitious and does manage to hit some of the higher notes.

Jules wants to hark back to a more fully realized film like Cocoon and maybe some other, “quirky” movies and that’s a problem; if Jules were any more quirky, it would be Zoeey Deschanel on steroids in full-blown Manic Pixie Dream Girl Mode. As it is, our little movie just sort of limps along.

The general conceit is that a flying saucer - very much a fifties style vehicle - crashes into an elderly gent’s backyard, crushing fence and azaleas, from which emerges a humanoid alien that our central protagonist Milton (Ben Kingsley doing what he can with pretty little) christens “Jules”. Milton lives alone, in his late seventies; his daughter, a veterinarian, lives in the same town and is concerned about his forgetfulness. 

Milton’s life is one of routine and if he is leading a life of quiet desperation, he expresses it differently than any human or character I’ve encountered. His response to seeing Jules the first time is “oh, my” with as little emphasis as he can muster. Indeed, the UFO in his backyard reads to him as a mere inconvenience that the town council needs to do something about it. Milton displays no curiosity about the craft or its inhabitant. 

Jules - played by ace stunt performer Jade Quon - arrives weakened and Milton soon discovers that water and apples aid greatly in the alien’s recovery but again, at the check-out at the supermarket where Milton has ordered a gross of apples, he tells the cashier these are for the alien that crashed in his yard. I suppose his nonchalance is to be read humorously, but it comes off as a pale shade of Chauncy Gardner. 

Unlike Being There’s better realized hero, Milton is less of a cypher and comes off as merely numb. But even that doesn’t come across as any kind of existential indifference or ennui, even. It’s just blankness, indifference to the moment. And it makes Milton difficult to accept as a character. Fortunately, there are others in the small ensemble to help flesh out Milton a little bit more; but these characters are similarly underwritten and it’s left to the actors to do the heavy lifting.

Thankfully, the ensemble is a banger; Harriet Sansom Harris is Sandy, another regular attendee at the weekly town meetings who wants to mentor young people as a way of feeling a useful part of the community. Sandy has considerably more life to her than Milton, isn’t dotty, and responds to the UFO and Jules with curiosity and enthusiasm that Jules just lacks. Jane Curtin as Joyce is a pricklier woman whose dreams of making it in the big city - Pittsburgh, to be clear - fell apart and she returned to their little hamlet of Boonton, PA. Sandy is reluctant to let Joyce in at first, and there is the merest thread of ambiguity to Joyce; initially, she finds credence to Milton’s statement on the UFO at that meeting when she discovers there’s a $10,000 reward for helping the NSA (or is it the FBI? Honestly, I didn’t really care enough for it to register and nothing came of that sub-plot to make it stick) find pieces of an intelligence satellite that had fallen over the region. 

Joyce was interesting for a second; was she going to sell them out? Was she going to gossip about Milton and Sandy’s friendship? Instead, she becomes quickly as anodyne as the rest of the characters. Zoe Winters as Milton’s daughter Denise comes across as the only somewhat fully realized character in the piece. Winsters is swell, of course, but it’s as if the scriptwriters couldn’t figure out how to do with Milton, Sandy, or Joyce what they did with Denise. 

OF course, Denise grows increasingly worried about her dad after his casual mentioning of the UFO publicly, following on the heels of finding a can of green beans in a medicine cabinet, and other examples of a slipping memory. She eventually cajoles him into meeting with a doctor but this angers and further alienates him from her. We also discover that Milton has been estranged from his son for some years. 

Sandy is similarly removed from her daughter whom she has not seen for three years since her daughter and her wife moved to the west coast. Joyce’s life is tinged with regret for not having made it as a singer. However, none of these situations are compelling enough because there is a general flatness that pervades the film. It’s in writing and the writing, but ultimately, it falls to the Marc Turtletaub, the director. As a producer, he’s shepherded some really good films into the world, from Sunshine Cleaning to Loving and Everything is Illuminated. I haven’t seen his other directorial efforts, but I think he may have been defeated by trying to find a consistent tone or narrative thread to follow here. 

Maybe it is Gavin Steckler’s script, though I’m not so sure; as written, the characters feel thin but there’s enough to flesh out and we do see it at different, infrequent moments of the film like when Milton leaves a message for his son, confessing his failure as a dad or the moments of genuine miscommunication between Milton or Denise or the hushed moment when Sandy expresses her sadness of not seeing her daughter for three years. But the moments are too isolated and countered by lulls in pace and again, the central character’s stolidity. 

Even toward the climax when it seems Milton is going to follow Richard Dreyfuss’s example in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there’s a lack of a similar catharsis, a lack of wonder, and while we do understand that Milton has arrived at a kind of peace that his place is here on Earth among his relationships with his daughter and his new-found friends, even that doesn’t land with much more than a kind of settling for the status quo. 

If I’ve spent more time on this than I’d otherwise choose, it’s because I see a much better film in here. The ingredients are present but they need some marinating, extending, and more flavor. 

A huge point in the film’s favor, though, is that if its target audience are the middle-aged and senior segment, it doesn’t pander. This may seem a strange element to laud, but despite missing the beat in filmmaking rhythm, Jules does treat its characters with a respect not often seen in more recent films about the older section of society. Nor does it mock the small town environment as parochial or hermetic. There is a genuine kindness built into the film’s fabric that I would have to be heartless to neglect to recognize. 

Sadly, though, more than a good heart is needed to make a film compelling. It may help it come alive here and there, but it requires a healthier system to get the blood flowing.