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    ‘Jules’ Review: Close Encounters of the Lonely Kind

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    Ben Kingsley plays an elderly man struggling with a fading memory when an extraterrestrial crashes into his life.Generally speaking, alien movies tend to go one of either two ways: horror or tenderness. Marc Turtletaub’s “Jules” falls squarely in the latter category — the titular alien who crash-lands in small-town Pennsylvania is a vegetarian, and eats apple slices given to him by his genial human host.But while the film’s premise will be familiar to anyone whose parents sat them down in front of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jules” replaces the usual child protagonists with a trio of baffled senior citizens, all of whom find kinship with the alien’s outsider status and know too well what will happen if word gets out on his arrival to Earth.Milton (Ben Kingsley) is struggling with a fading memory and a strained relationship with his adult daughter (Zoë Winters), whose insistence that he see a psychiatrist escalates when he tells her an alien spaceship destroyed his bird bath. When his pleas for help with the small gray alien are ignored by the other townsfolk, Milton invites the injured extraterrestrial, played by Jade Quon, into his home, and the two quickly form a bond. (Despite Jules — Milton’s nickname for the alien — being nonverbal, he appears to perfectly understand English.) Before long, Milton’s neighbors Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin) learn of the visitor and, noticing all the suited government officials that have mysteriously arrived in town, decide to help Milton keep their new friend a secret.Underneath its ridiculous framing and outer-space high jinks, “Jules” is full to the brim with empathy for its elderly characters and their desire for personal agency. Kingsley’s performance as Milton injects dignity into a character that could have easily (and cruelly) been played just for laughs, and Harris and Curtin provide similar complexities to their respective roles. In Jules, all three of them are reminded of the importance of companionship in their lives, and how isolation in their old age has made each of them desperately cling to what little they have left. It’s a realization that leads Joyce, with Jules’s help, to finally say goodbye to her aging cat, in a funeral scene that’s as heartwarming as it is absurd.Turtletaub keeps the film’s campier elements to a minimum, preferring to highlight the quaint suburban setting and a lighthearted, understated sense of humor. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” this is not, and despite Jules being a threat to national security, it often feels as though Turtletaub would rather you be curled up in your seat with a mug of cocoa than on the edge of it. But the sweetness isn’t entirely unwelcome — not every alien movie can be “Alien.”JulesRated PG-13 for language and some cartoon sci-fi violence. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dalíland’ Review: Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí, Man and Myth

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      Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí, the man and the mustachioed myth, as he contends with his demanding wife and the far more voracious art world.One of the best things about “Dalíland,” Mary Harron’s amused and amusing fictional look at the singular Salvador Dalí, is that it isn’t a cradle-to-grave exhumation. Instead, the movie focuses on a period in Dalí’s later years when he was widely, wrongly and seemingly permanently eclipsed both by the commercial profile of his art and by the flamboyant scandal he had made of his life. Harron’s result is less a consummate portrait and more a distillation of a sensibility, as if she had dropped Dalí in an alcohol still to extract his very essence.The man, the myth and the mustache are all here, albeit modestly. Harron’s path into Dalí’s world is through an invented character, James (the newcomer Christopher Briney), who’s recently landed a job at the artist’s New York gallery. An anodyne pretty boy, James serves as a proxy for the viewer, a wide-eyed tourist in a seductively foreign land. He enters partly by chance, although his looks and good timing help: Dalí (Ben Kingsley), who’s struggling to produce sufficient new work for an upcoming show, recruits James as an assistant, ushering him into the frantic, at times funny and often bleak bacchanalia of the movie’s title.Much of the story takes place in 1974, starting with one of Dalí’s customary winter sojourns at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. There, in a spacious suite wreathed in cigarette smoke and throbbing with rock music, he and his formidable, sometimes terrifying wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), preside over a glittery circus that’s populated by beautiful people and supplicating waiters, and watched over by Dalí ’s longtime aide, Captain Moore (Rupert Graves). Amid the ostrich boas, flowing Champagne and lines of coke, the slack-jawed James meets hangers-on like Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) as well as the artist’s muse Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic), and one exceedingly dull love interest, Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse).James isn’t all that interesting, either, and there’s too much of him in the movie. This isn’t Briney’s fault; he’s pleasant to look at, and he manages his transition from tourist to accidental Dalí-wood guide well enough. It’s just that once Dalí and Gala swan in, they immediately and rightly become the only characters you want to spend time with. They’re entertaining, for one, having long settled into roles that feed their public profiles and public relations: She’s the money-grubbing dominatrix while he alternately cowers, begs for her attention and upstages her. The relationship provides tension and mystery that the well-matched Kingsley and Sukowa complicate with gargoyle masks and shocks of vulnerability.The story — the screenplay is by John C. Walsh — follows James as he tumbles further and further down the curious Dalí-Gala rabbit hole. It’s a predictable scene on one level, filled with writhing bodies, orgiastic evenings, pathological marital warfare and a great deal of tawdry art-world shenanigans. Considerably less obvious is Dalí and Gala’s confounding union, which began in the 1920s. Harron fills in some of the couple’s fascinating story largely through a few inventively staged flashbacks in which the old Dalí and James share the screen with the young Dalí (Ezra Miller, vivid and otherworldly in a small role) and Gala (Avital Lvova).I wish “Dalíland” incorporated more of the young Dalí and Gala, partly because the images of the older Dalí physically transported into his memories are both visually striking and quietly touching. They also illustrate the centrality of time in Dalí’s work, a theme encapsulated in his most popular painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), of a clock melting like warm Camembert on a long-lashed human face. The flashbacks help establish the emotional and psychological foundation for the couple’s relationship, one that’s encapsulated by the sight of the young Dalí, having apparently just completed that early masterpiece, weepily burying his head in Gala’s lap like a child. (The movie doesn’t include any of Dalí’s actual artworks.)Dalí and Gala’s relationship mystified many people over many well-publicized tumultuous decades. The filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Dalí’s old schoolmate and collaborator on the Surrealist classics “Un Chien Andalou” and “L’Age D’or,” pointedly blamed Gala in his memoir “My Last Sigh” for the men’s estrangement, calling her “a woman I have always tried to avoid.” Buñuel’s violent animus toward Gala (he wrote that he once physically attacked her) is startling, and it’s hard to know how much of his loathing was inflamed by old-fashioned sexism. While “Dalíland” occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.“We need money,” the older Gala blurts out to the abashed Dalí during one bellicose confrontation over his lack of productivity, “money, money!” It’s a comic-pathetic scene, and while it would be easy to turn Gala into the villain of this story, Harron never does. Gala may be outrageous and at times deeply unkind, but Dalí married her, stayed with her, painted her. And she isn’t wrong: With their expensive habits and tastes, she and Dalí do need money to pay their bills, but also — as this movie repeatedly reminds you — “money, money, money” is what the far crueler, far greedier and far more destructive art world demands.DalílandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Ben Kingsley Seeks Out the Performances That Transcend

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      The Oscar winner, now playing Salvador Dalí in “Dalíland,” talks about “Waiting for Godot,” D.H. Lawrence and the way Britten’s “War Requiem” helps him understand history.Ben Kingsley takes his accolades seriously. Knighted in 2002 for service to the British film industry, he prefers to be addressed as Sir Ben.But even a knight needs his sleep, especially if he’s been spending every waking hour shooting a Marvel series. No matter if it’s the coronation day of King Charles III.“I wasn’t up that early but I did catch some lovely glimpses,” he said, calling from Los Angeles to talk about his latest film, “Dalíland,” out June 9.Kingsley draws on a catalog of absurdist mustaches and sexual predilections to play the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí as he prepares for an important exhibition in 1974 while his marriage to Gala — muse, helpmate, tormentor — crumbles.“It was a leap into genius that I found exhilarating and exhausting,” he said. “That sublime tightrope that he walked between caring desperately about what people thought, and yet being utterly indifferent to what they thought — that, I think, was the most challenging to portray.”Kingsley, who soared to fame with his Oscar-winning “Gandhi,” likes to keep his characters varied. His latest projects include “Jules,” out Aug. 11, about a small-town Pennsylvanian who gets close to an extraterrestrial, and the upcoming Disney+ “Wonder Man” series in which he’s reprising Trevor Slattery, his recurring Marvel role.And his cultural necessities change with his mood. “In other words, had you asked me two hours later, the list might have been entirely different,” he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘The Daughter of Auschwitz’Tova Friedman was 5 when the Red Army liberated the prisoners from Auschwitz, and she has written this remarkable book on her childhood in Auschwitz. I spent a morning with her, and it was profoundly inspiring and humbling to be in her presence. She asked me to write the foreword to her book. My commitment to the memory of the Holocaust has come to me personally by spending such time with Simon Wiesenthal, with Elie Wiesel, with Tova Friedman and other heroic, extraordinary survivors who will, as Elie Wiesel says, tell tales of their history.2Albert CamusI have his collection of essays, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that was given to me a very long time ago, and parts of it I still struggle to fully comprehend. The language is so dense and brilliant that I get glimpses of his universe and what he has recognized in patterns of human behavior that I, too, recognize as a portrayer. I delve into that collection time after time after time, and every time I read it I have changed. Therefore, the resonance of that passage has also changed.3‘Snake’D.H. Lawrence builds the poem dramatically about how he found a snake sipping out of his water trough and clumsily throws this lump of wood. Then he says, “I think it did not hit him.” Toward the end, there’s that wonderful line, “And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords of life.” I read the poem at Dickie Attenborough’s 80th birthday. As you know, he became Lord Attenborough. And I concluded my reading by saying, “And thank heavens I did not miss my chance.”4World War I History on the PageMany of us who live in peacetime must find the First World War utterly incomprehensible, as do we find other parts of 20th-century history. Sometimes they have to be translated musically, graphically, poetically, dramatically. I’ve read A.J.P. Taylor’s history of the First World War. I have a monumental book at home in Oxfordshire, photographs of the First World War published in 1933, just when Hitler came into power. I’m even thinking about a film of the First World War.5World War I History in MusicBenjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” made that whole horrible period of history, to me, tangible. I somehow — and I can’t put it any other way — I felt it. That, I think, is what the artist does: allows us to feel that which we cannot comprehend. And that is the artist’s great gift, to share that feeling with the tribe.6Nusrat Fateh Ali KhanI saw him live at the Royal Albert Hall years ago, shortly before his tragic death. It was Pavarotti of all people who said the greatest voice in the world is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s. And it is the most extraordinary voice, the range. Devotional music — that which transcends, that which sings to and about the higher power — it’s performed with energy and magnificence, but it comes from a humble center.7‘Waiting for Godot’I performed it with the late, great Alan Howard and was directed by the late, great Sir Peter Hall, who directed the first appearance of “Godot” ever. So it was a full circle for him. To be in a rehearsal room with that power — Beckett, Hall and Howard — was extraordinary. It was at the Old Vic, and I didn’t want the run to end. There were times onstage where I didn’t know whether I was performing or in a great act of prayer.8Sergei EisensteinI went to a very good English school and by some wonderful stroke of fate, the head of the film society decided to show some Eisenstein films. I was utterly enthralled by the scale of them. I remember [in “Ivan the Terrible”] this endless column of human beings. Now they would say to the actor playing Ivan, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll CGI it.” Which leaves the actor without his counterpart. It’s acting in a vacuum. But some directors think they can capture the same body-chemistry change in the actor as when he’s being pursued by 100,000 people. Look at the Salt March in “Gandhi.” How do you think I felt at the front of it? Extraordinary. I don’t think my sandals touched the ground.9GaudíI wondered whether Dalí would love Gaudí, both being Spanish. I’ve seen Gaudí architecture in Barcelona, and it is remarkable. It’s as if the stone is melting, a little bit like Dalí’s famous melting clock. Gaudí — melting stone, the most beautiful curves, sensual. It’s extraordinary.10‘Never Take No for an Answer’The film is about an Italian orphan called Peppino, who has a donkey called Violetta. The donkey falls very ill and he insists on going to Rome to get permission from the Holy Father, the Pope, to demolish the wall of the St. Francis chapel and let his donkey in to be blessed. I looked almost exactly like the little boy in the film and was hailed in the foyer of the cinema, mistaken for him. It left an indelible impression on me and I decided then and there, “I want to be him. I want to be Peppino.” More