ALIENATED

Now in theaters:

Jules--Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a widower pushing 80. A mild-mannered guy, he putters around his small Pennsylvania hometown, making inane proposals at city council meetings, tending the flowers in the backyard of his beautiful home, and resisting the efforts of his fretful daughter (Zoë Winters) to make him get a checkup.

Then one day Milton finds that a flying saucer has crash-landed in his backyard, wiping out his azaleas and shattering his birdbath. Soon the craft's silent alien occupant, dubbed Jules, is staying in the house, watching TV and eating apple slices between shifts repairing the saucer.

Initially, Milton doesn't make a secret of any of this. He calls 9-1-1; they think it's a prank. He mentions it to the guy at the supermarket (while buying apples) and it gets back to the daughter, who assumes it's a sign of early onset dementia.

That's the best joke in this wistful, extremely low-key sci-fi comedy--the idea that elderly people are so ignored in our society that an alien visitation could go unnoticed if it happened among seniors. Eventually two ladies (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin) from the council meetings learn about and befriend Jules, and advise Milton to secrecy, but there's little urgency to the situation.

Kingsley starts out very deadpan and reserved; it may be that Milton is being careful to hide a cognitive decline. But the performance opens up as the story progresses, and both Jules and the two ladies draw out Milton's perceptive, hospitable warmth.

Harris and Curtin are both lovable as lonely, bored women who know they are, just by virtue of longevity and experience, a resource that's being wasted. Curtin even gets to sing "Free Bird." Under the prosthetics, stuntwoman Jade Quon brings a stoic gravity and woebegone sweetness to the bluish-white, earless, hairless, black-eyed Jules. Standing next to the saucer, wearing an old Spuds Mackenzie t-shirt, this visitor is an absurdly endearing figure.

Director Marc Turtletaub and screenwriter Gavin Steckler seem to have a little trouble figuring out how to end the movie; the last few scenes have a fitful, uncertain quality. But overall, this is a small gem--sort of an E.T. for the other end of the life span.