STARBURST favourite Sir Ben Kingsley delivers a charming, low-key performance as a man facing his own mortality gifted one final glorious adventure in this delightful fantasy directed by Marc Turtletaub. It’s a geriatric take on ET, a film that refreshingly flies in the face of the youth culture obsession and gives a trio of veteran actors an opportunity to show the youngsters that age is no barrier to having fun and flying high.
SBK plays Milton Robinson, a widower living alone in a small town in Pennsylvania who occupies his time making the same spurious applications to the local city council. His busy veterinarian daughter visits when she can, but his behaviour leads her to suspect that he’s suffering from the early stages of dementia. Unsurprisingly, when a UFO crashlands in his back garden, disgorging an injured, uncommunicative child-like alien he decides to name Jules, no one is inclined to believe him and his story is dismissed as just another senile fantasy. Milton seems to come alive again when he takes it upon himself to help the alien recover, and when his two friends – Joyce (Jane Curtin) and Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) – discover his secret, they work together to help the alien repair his stricken vessel so he can return to the stars. But NASA is tracking the fallen ship and is closing in, and the trio find themselves in a race against time to help Jules find his way back into space.
Jules is an uplifting and heart-warming film that’s not just about an alien crashing on Earth. It’s about the cruelty of the ageing process, the way older people can sometimes become invisible to younger generations and how the elderly are often treated as a nuisance, an encumbrance and an inconvenience at a time in their lives when they most need to be loved and appreciated. It’s also about how older people can be given a new lease of life and how life doesn’t have to grind to a halt just because it’s been long-lived. Poignant, affecting, and often laugh-out-loud funny, Jules is a joyous treat that will warm even the coldest of winter hearts.
JULES is released in cinemas in the UK on December 29th
