Jules review: Ben Kingsley, as a confused small-town Codger who befriends an alien, can't save this sweet but pallid fairy tale

Ben Kingsley, who likes to go to extremes, played his share of repressed and overly civilized geeks and also its share of furious walking maniacs. But for all of Kingsley's deft range of light and dark, it's still rare to see him play a character as achingly sweet as Milton, the small-town guy he plays in "Jules."

Milton, who is 78, lives alone in a beautiful dark clapboard home in Boonton, Penn. In the opening scene, he takes one of his long, slow walks through town, then stands up to the open-mic forum in front of Boonton City Council, where he suggests changing the town's motto from "Un great place to call home” at “A great place to call home.” He's that kind of harmless quirky fuddy-duddy with maybe a screw or two that comes loose. The following week, he attends another city council meeting, where he stands up and says the exact same thing.

Milton, in his tousled gray hair and plastic aviator frames, old plaid shirts and his sweaters open, with a blank, confused stare (looks like he hasn't smiled in 40 years), maybe he's losing his faculties, or maybe he's always been on some kind of of spectrum. He spends most of his time watching television, and when his daughter, Denise (Zoë Winters), visits him to organize the bills, she notices that he left a box of green beans in the medicine cabinet. She urges him to see a neurologist.

But "Jules", which comes across as one of those quiet independent portraits from The Quirkiness That Is Life is not the movie it seems to be. Milton, as a character, is so blandly hemmed in, so disaffected in his rotivity, so limited in his curiosity about the outside world that the director, Marc Turtletaub, takes on the attitude that he couldn't be so interesting about his own. . That's why, one night, a flying saucer crashes in his garden.

This is not a very large flying saucer, maybe 20 feet in diameter, resembling two metal soup bowls stuck together. And it's the defining moment of what a piece of Milton is when he greets the view with a slightly anxious "Oh my God", instantly focusing on the main effect of this cosmic event: the spacecraft has landed. on his azaleas and crushed his birdbath! < /p>

A little later he notices that an alien, possibly injured, is lying a few meters from the vessel. It's now officially a close encounter movie, though the 'joke', for a moment, is that Milton is as indifferent and unfazed by it all as he is by everything else. When he speaks to a supermarket cashier, with absolute naturalness, about the extraterrestrial, he sounds like someone who is entering the early stages of dementia. And from what we can see, maybe he is. But even if that's the case, he's still an old man with a mental slip in the middle of a movie that looks like it's going to be a minimalist version of "Cocoon" sprinkled with the vibe of "Being There."

The alien, played under highly effective makeup by Jade Quon, is a small humanoid creature that resembles exactly like every alien design we've seen since the 1970s (bald, with dark android eyes and a slight pout on her mouth), and she looks like she was sculpted out of white wax. Most alien visitation movies, from "Forbidden Planet" to "E.T.", spend a lot of time finding out what makes the alien tick, but in this case, there's not much to find out. The stranger, baptized Jules, drinks water and eats apples; she never says anything; she's sitting on the couch with a sad look, watching "Judge Judy" with Milton.

Simply put, not enough is going on in "Jules". It's a sweet but soggy trifle that's overly pleased with itself, and while you can see, in the abstract, why Kingsley was drawn to this character, the movie doesn't make him what he would have. to make. He doesn't use his relationship with the alien to unravel the inner quality of Milton's emotional magic. Jules the extraterrestrial never becomes an ambiguous and tempting figure; she looks more like a figurine. A few of Milton City Council's fellow junkies, the rambunctious Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and sourball Joyce (Jane Curtin), become his co-conspirators to cover up the alien's existence. They put Jules in a T-shirt that...