Several elderly Britishers react to their unhappy circumstances with a life-changing decision to move to India once they see an ad for a pretty retirement home, known as the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful. When they reach the place they learn that the ad was a tad fanciful, and that remaining there will challenge them in ways they would never have imagined. But people, being as adaptable as they are, find a way, and that is the crux of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
The film brims with talent before and behind the camera. The seven travelers are played by Dame Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and Maggie Smith. The director is John Madden, whose Shakespeare in Love shocked Saving Private Ryan to win the 1998 Best Picture Oscar. The film was lensed on location in Jaipur (Udaipur), India, a microcosm of the country that displays not only its beauty and serenity but its overcrowded streets and poverty, as well as its modern, impersonal business side.
It is a film about older people, and as such, will fight to find an audience (at least so think the major film studios, which greenlight few movies of this ilk). It is a low-key character study, with vignettes of its travelers in place of full-blown dramatic stories, as those travelers endeavor to adapt to a new environment with conditions which they did not foresee. It is dramatic and humorous and everything in between, without a singular tone that some, perhaps many, viewers would expect. Each character determines his or her own path in India, some satisfactorily, and some not.
Generally I enjoyed the film because it is amusing, and wise, and realistic. It is not always satisfying as drama, just like life. People do things or feel things that prevent them from opening themselves to the world’s possibilities and they suffer for it; and that is not always easy or fun to watch. Some stories do not have happy endings. Yet the movie — apart from a certain patness of plot involving the hotel’s future — is quite effective in its ambitions, very well put together technically, and certainly thought provoking as we all head for our golden years. ☆ ☆ ☆. 24 May 2012.