Marc Turtletaub’s Jules starts just as many stories about elderly retired men do, with all the grumpiness and stubborn behavior that might suggest. However, despite its rather conventional trappings early on, Turtletaub and his small but impressive cast quickly find their footing,resulting in a rather unique and frequently hilarious perspective on aging and loneliness. For sure, Jules is a strange little movie, but between its enormous heart and its willingness to go to unapologetically goofy places, it’s also a pretty decent one.
Movies about aging and dementia don’t often stray too far off the path. First, you’ve got your stories about curmudgeons who learn to love life through the intervention of plucky neighbors, estranged grandchildren, or stern but devoted caregivers. Then there are the ones told from the perspective of a frustrated loved one who doesn’t know how to cope with a parent’s loss of faculties. And then there are the trippy ones, where we’re trapped in a nightmare of confusion right along with our protagonist. There are, of course, variations on these themes, but by and large, this is what we’re given.
Oddly enough, Jules has elements of all of these, but because its various bits and bobs are so wrapped up in a completely out-of-this-world premise (and I mean that literally), they free themselves from nearly all expectations. Just when you think you might have Jules all figured out, something unexpected happens that takes it into an entirely new realm of quirkiness. And it’s these swerves, some of which are darkly out of left field and don’t always fit the tone of the film (cat lovers, you’ve been warned), that at least keep things interesting.
To be perfectly honest, though, the premise, at least on paper, is borderline juvenile. When an aging widower named Milton (Ben Kingsley) discovers a crashed alien spacecraft in his backyard, everyone, including his daughter (Zoe Winters), the city council, the police, and even the grocery store clerk, assumes he’s just a senile old man talking crazy. But when other seniors (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin) catch a glimpse of the craft and, more importantly, the being who has crawled out of it (an unrecognizable Jade Quon), a secret conspiracy is formed to keep their new friend from falling into the hands of government officials. The longer the alien is with them (who they’ve decided to name Jules, despite one in the group who insists it looks more like a “Gary”), the more they grow attached. It’s this attachment that gives Jules much of its heart, but there’s more to it than that.
Each of the three conspirators sees something different in Jules (Gary) and attaches in different ways, but mostly they just want someone to talk to, even if that someone never responds or even changes their facial expression. In this way, Jules acts as a non-judgmental outlet for them to express their feelings of loneliness and regret, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the sweetest things I’ve seen all year.
Where Jules is most poignant, though, is in how it portrays Milton. As the archetypal hard-headed senior who refuses to acknowledge that he may be slipping, Kingsley hits his marks adequately, but what happens next is surprising. Where most films would wrench at the heartstrings by having us see him fully succumb to his illness by the end of the film, that’s not what happens. Instead, with the unintentional help of Jules and his new friends, Milton comes to terms with the extreme difficulties of his near future and vows to stay with his daughter and carry on as best he can. When we leave him, he still has his faculties, and even though we know he won’t be able to hang on to them for much longer, Turtletaub and writer Gavin Steckler allow Milton to retain his dignity all the way through the end of the film. As it turns out, Jules is quite a human story after all.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.