Screenwriter Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given us this goofy, likable new twist on ET. In the Mathison/Spielberg classic from 1982, the visiting extraterrestrial found safety within the secret world of children, whose existence is beneath the grownups’ notice. Now the space alien finds himself protected by old people, who are used to being patronised and ignored.
Chief among the alien’s allies is Milton, played by Ben Kingsley, an ageing widower in whose back garden his spaceship crash-lands, and who, with instinctive neighbourly kindness, welcomes the mute, hairless naked interplanetary creature into his house. Milton has dementia, and so when he tells locals that he is having to get extra food in for the alien, no one pays much attention other than to relay this apparently sad and upsetting news to Milton’s grownup daughter Denise (played by Zoë Winters, who plays Logan Roy’s assistant and mistress Kerry in TV’s Succession). The scene in which Milton fails the dementia test in the doctor’s office is genuinely sweet and sad due to the fact that it could have taken place in an entirely different, serious film.
Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin play Milton’s neighbours Sandy and Joyce and the film rather shrewdly shows us that they are, in their own ways, just as unhappy and sad as Milton: alienated from grownup children and in Joyce’s case, alienated from her own exciting and daring youth in the big city. Unlike Milton, Joyce does not forget, but the world is itself indifferent to her thoughts and memories and dementia is being socially imposed on her from without.
This is a sentimental and folksy film, and the ending is a little garbled, but there is a gentleness and sweetness there, and Kingsley carries it off very well.
