Close encounters of the head-scratching kind
Inside the sci-fi dramedy “Jules” lurks a message about senior citizens being ignored and deprived of their independence simply because of their age. Unfortunately, the script by Gavin Steckler takes a most confounding route to get to it — one involving an alien, town hall meetings, and FBI agents who want to keep the extraterrestrial here under wraps.
The only believable element in this misfire is the familiar-looking alien (played by Jade Quon); the people act in ways that make no logical sense.
The titular alien’s ship crash-lands in the backyard of Milton (Ben Kingsley), a resident of the fictional western Pennsylvania town of Boonton. The UFO takes out Milton’s azaleas and destroys his birdbath. I will never forget those details because Milton repeats them at the town hall meetings several times. He’s far more concerned about his flowers than about what crushed them.
When Milton first sees Jules’s ship, he quietly mutters “oh my,” as if he were channeling George Takei. He brings the shivering alien, who is laying on the ground and may be injured, a glass of water and a blanket. Eventually, the alien finds his way into Milton’s house, where he is christened Jules and given some apples to eat. Jules is mute, but he keeps drawing pictures of cats.
So far, Milton is treating this thing from another world as if it were a damn squirrel. At the weekly town meeting, he goes through his usual litany of requests to the governing board, a list we’ve heard before. It includes changing the town slogan and putting a “crosswalk on Trent Avenue between Frost and Allegheny.” He casually adds that a UFO has landed in his backyard, but nobody takes him seriously. Milton’s veterinarian daughter, Denise (Zoë Winters), thinks her father may have dementia.
Since Milton’s list is repeated numerous times, I kept expecting a payoff, perhaps a scene where someone almost gets run over on Trent between Frost and Allegheny. Alas, the list is just another extraneous detail in a film full of them.
The next person to encounter Jules is Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris), a widow who is kind of sweet on Milton. She arrives at his house and, in the film’s sole moment of believable human behavior, reacts to Jules the way you’re supposed to react to an alien. Jules is also discovered by nosy neighbor Joyce (Jane Curtin), who spots him because Jules can easily be seen from the sidewalk outside Milton’s house.
Soon, Sandy and Joyce are talking to Jules, telling him all their problems, as he’s a captive audience. Joyce comments that he has understanding eyes, but to me it looked like Jules was thinking “what did I do to deserve such punishment?” Joyce even sings an awful version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” to Jules, in a scene that director Marc Turtletaub unwisely intercuts with Sandy being nearly murdered by a man who came to rob her house.
It’s here that we finally learn some useful information about Jules: He can telepathically cause people’s heads to explode. Sandy’s reaction to her attacker’s head suddenly going bye-bye is one of bemusement, as if he’d merely burped while attempting to strangle her to death.
We also learn that Jules’s ship runs on cats, specifically dead ones. Maybe he’s from the same planet as ALF, the cat-eating 1980s sitcom alien. “Jules” doesn’t give us the pleasure of seeing the aforementioned exploding head (there’s only a fleeting glimpse of the aftermath), but the film lovingly depicts cat carcasses in varying states of decay. Cat lovers, beware.
While watching this film, I heard someone say “What the [F-bomb]?” three times. The first time was Sandy’s initial reaction to seeing Jules. The second time was when a police officer saw Milton scrape dead animals off the street and shovel them into his trunk.
The third time was after the film ended — and that was me. Granted, I’m not in the movie, but I’m counting it anyway.