Crazy Helplessness – Weekend
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In the Russian box office, the touching comedy Jules, in which the main characters in their seventies do the same thing that the children in Steven Spielberg’s The Alien did forty years ago — save an alien from outer space from vigilant fighters of the invisible front, and this ingenuous film by Mark Turtletaub is a little deeper than it might seem from its annotation.
The days of the stern pensioner Milton (Ben Kingsley) are monotonous: first he waters the rhododendrons in the backyard, then he watches detective stories in which something unpredictable always happens, not like his. Milton also has a City Council meeting once a week, where you can share ideas for the development of your hometown. Ideas, however, do not shine with novelty: firstly, it would be worth editing the city’s motto, and secondly, moving the pedestrian crossing to make it more convenient and safer. Occasionally, Milton’s daughter comes by, fills up bills quickly and looks anxiously at her father’s progressive Alzheimer’s, but rarely answers his phone calls. But one day in the middle of the night, Milton is awakened by flashes and a roar outside the window. Looking out into the garden, grandfather is convinced that not something, but a real flying saucer, dived right into his flower garden. “Maybe it’s still senile?” the main character thinks and goes back to sleep. But “Alzheimer” has nothing to do with it: in the morning the plate is still in place, no matter how much they laugh at him in the rescue service. Moreover, a gray-blue alien of indeterminate gender emerges from the bowels of the spaceship (Jade Kwon, who once starred as a stuntman in Star Trek, works here in complex plastic make-up), and, therefore, it is necessary to establish relations with an alien mind. Helping Milton in this is annoyingly outgoing grandmother neighbors Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin).
The enthusiasm of pensioners is understandable: there are not so many adventures in a lonely, albeit rather comfortable, old age. And the transgalactic visitor, whom they call Jules, brings life to life, uniting old people no worse than Steven Spielberg’s stray alien once united youngsters. Pensioners share their sadness with the silent humanoid: youth is gone, children do not call, and ahead is an abyss deeper than space. And of course, they learn interesting properties of the alien: from the earth, he prefers to eat apples, microwaves of the brain can blow someone’s head at a distance, but he can’t speak. On the other hand, he draws cats – it is they, in the amount of seven pieces, that he needs to repair the spaceship and take off from the hospitable planet as soon as possible. Do not ask how cat traction works, here is the very case when it is better to see everything yourself.
“Jules” by Mark Turtletaub, who is best known as the producer of the film “Little Miss Sunshine”, perhaps, can give that teary Oscar melodrama a head start in touching: the plot of the aforementioned “Alien” unfolds in the circumstances of the late Eldar Ryazanov. The only difference, perhaps, is that in “Promised Heaven” or “Old Nags” older heroes were surrounded by a raging time of change, while in “Jules” they survive in the midst of a calm of depressing stability. But both are disastrous for a living soul. Another domestic film that will immediately come to the mind of the Russian viewer of Jules is Boris Khlebnikov’s Crazy Help, where a retired engineer performed by Sergei Dreyden helped a perfect alien in Moscow, Belarusian Zhenya, played by Yevgeny Syty, settle down on his land. There, the daughter also asked the old father to take care of herself and “drink pills”, and it was much more interesting for him to make contact with his duck friends and counteract the evil in police uniform.
Despite the smooth direction, entertaining script and excellent acting work – indeed, watching Ben Kingsley, his gray hair and cardigan is a joy in itself, and the partners do not lag behind – to call “Jules” a truly outstanding film, the language will not turn. This is still a mass comedy, and, moreover, rightly designed for an older audience. Young people here are entertained mainly with prints on funny T-shirts, which will certainly be ridiculously smeared in the Russian box office in accordance with the domestic law on countering LGBT propaganda. However, in Jules, for all its benevolent foolishness, there is also a certain ruthlessness that lifts it above the sea of other lyrical comedies with a deceptively uncontested happy ending. In the character of Ben Kingsley, who cannot properly wash the dishes, deal with the TV remote control, pay bills and, as if by chance, puts cans of canned vegetables on the shelf in the bathroom, one can see that universal tragedy, the circumstances of which the viewer does not need to explain. Each of those who in the eighties was touched by the misadventures of Spielberg’s alien, having matured, one way or another already encountered her, if not in life, then in the film by Florian Zeller “Father”. Yes, old age and loneliness are more merciless than the agents of national security who have been hunting down good aliens in the territory of American cinema for centuries. You can’t fool them and you can’t beat them. And even flying away from them to a galaxy far, far away is unlikely to succeed.
In theaters from 31 August
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