Three senior citizens meet an extraterrestrial in “Jules,” a film that will never be mistaken for “E.T.” or “Cocoon,” even though science fiction fans will think about both of them constantly, and the film doesn’t discourage them from doing so. The setting is Boonton, Pennsylvania, a town that’s just rural enough that an old-school, 1960s-looking flying saucer could crash in the backyard of a man named Milton Robinson (Ben Kingsley) without being seen by anyone else in the community.Jules 2023 Movie Download
The movie is unusual in exploring the relative isolation of older Americans in the 21st century, at a time when technology supposedly brings everyone closer together. Those aspects of the story resonate more strongly when they’re explored directly than when they’re being broached through science-fiction metaphors. Milton doesn’t have much regular contact with anyone but his veterinarian daughter Denise (Zoe Winters of “Succession”) and the town officials and citizens he sees weekly at a city council meeting. We assume Milton is widowed, although the movie doesn’t get into that aspect of his life, and he has another adult child, a son, that he hasn’t spoken to for a long time because they’re estranged (the son apparently resents him for unspecified failures of parenting). As played by Kingsley—who has put a lot of thought into the character’s accent, facial comportment, and gestures, and has been fitted with a hairpiece and glasses that make him look like he could be Noam Chomsky’s long-lost brother—Milton is the sort of older man that you might see all the time at a local post office or supermarket but not really register until he stops coming around.What gives his life meaning are the regular appearances before the city council, where he repeatedly raises the same two issues: changing the town’s slogan and installing a crosswalk at a particular intersection. Unfortunately, even the relatively modest feeling of regularity is jeopardized by Milton’s early onset Alzheimer’s, which is established early in the story by showing the character asking the same two questions repeatedly at the council meetings and putting a can of green beans in an upstairs bathroom medicine cabinet.