The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: Blogging Away, One Day at a Time

Evelyn (Judy Dench), our resident blogger (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)

When first seen: Maggie Smith as Mrs Donnelly making a scene in a UK hospital room: “There’s an Indian in there!” she says

Dear friends and readers,

For a few minutes afterward, this movie helps make you be glad to be alive, with time yet to retrieve, to compensate, to use as best you can. Now I’ve written the sort of review where you should’ve seen the film first. So let me say to anyone coming over here, go see the film first, and then come back here, and read. To those who have no intention of going to see the film, read on.

It’s more touching than funny; the trailer (as ever) misrepresents it as vulgar exploitation of remarkable older British actors placed in India with lots of (probably) stale jokes. Well, certainly it does have a roster of superb older actors, all of them getting on and photographed to show that. They do go to India and the photography is spectactularly good, with a successful filming of places to give us a strong feel of their presence and what it might feel to be in such a place, this from the time it opens in modern UK (London mostly) to the airplane trip, the busses, India and its environs.

India — early landscape seen from afar, before landing

The theater we go to was unusually crowded — and perhaps yours will be too. The movie was playing on two screens (very unusual) and the auditorium we were in was jam-packed. Indeed we were not able to go to the show we came for (4:45); but instead went to the 5:05. There were lines to get in – another rarity for this small semi-art theater. However, it didn’t take much to see the lines were made up of mostly older people. There were people younger than 40 I’d say but they did not predominate and the average age might have been close to mine. Lots of older men — which is not common in costume dramas or movies of this type (maybe at all).

The movie was about retired people. Seven of them, to which an eighth is added who was born and grew up in India. As the movie begins, we are introduced to each in turn, complete with an intertitle typed (computer style print-out) first name right before our very eyes:

Inside of a UK building (we do also see some gardens from high windows)

The contrast in India

Judi Dench is first to be seen. She is phoning someone who makes her wait and then refuses to answer her questions about the computer program whose terms are puzzling her. You see she’s not the registered owner. Can the voice speak to the owner? Evelyn says he’s dead (her husband). Evelyn or Mrs Greenslade goes from this opening of not coping with a computer to being quite the daily blogger. Dench’s over-voice provides the sense of time passing (Day 9, Day 51) and she functions as a kind of reflective narrator. The lines are very good. Filled with thoughtful reflections on life as lived for this group of people but also anyone. I would have liked to take some of it down. I hope I don’t have to tell my reader that Dench reads superbly well (well they all do). You don’t really have to be 60 or 70 to bond with this film.

Mrs Greenslade and Mrs Hardcastle look about them

At least four of our group are struggling to survive on what has turned out to be too small a pension (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton presented as married Ainsleys, Douglas and Jean), or life-savings gone (same couple, Celia Imrie as Mrs Hardcastle and she without a partner), or unexpected indebtedness when a husband dies (Judi Dench’s character). One or two or just had enough of their repetitive lives (Tom Wilkinson, a successful court judge, Mr Graham Dashwood), or have been left out in the cold with no one to be with and nothing to do (Jack Pickup as Norman and Maggie Smith as Muriel Donnelly).

Maggie Smith’s story unfolds from that of a woman on a hospital bed with wheels, waiting in a corridor to be seen to because she has refused the services of a black doctor. She is working class (a strong working class accent is used) and racially a bigot, xenophobic it seems. We gradually learn that she spent her life as a high servant in a great house, housekeeper cum-nanny (shades of Downton Abbey except that most houses did not have extensive staffs) who when she grew too old was her pensioned off, deemed useless (superfluous) once she trained the replacement. Now she just doesn’t know what to do. She has nothing to do, nowhere to go (and no one to be with). Some of Smith’s expressions as she retold her story reminded me of Smith in her magnificent part of Alice in Bennet’s Bed among Lentils.

She needs a new hip and the quickest way to get it is go to India for the operation. She learns that people abandon her wheelchair if she is unpleasant; have little use for her demands. She must live in this multicultural multi-colored world. Arriving, an untouchable young girl provides her with food and company, invites her to see her family because she, Mrs Donnelly, notices here. Of course she gradually softens, begins to shed her bigotries.

Later on in India

She is relieved to see that her approbation is wanted, then worries she has hurt someone’s feelings, then grateful these Indian people want her, need her, and by film’s end (after her hip replacement and her first short walk) is womaning the clerk’s desk at the Hotel, managing it the way she once did her employers’. It is she who goes over the hotel’s books and devises a scheme for keeping it afloat.

Saving the day

By the end of the movie we feel she saves the day for the young Indian couple who need the hotel. (I told you to see the film first.) No need for her to worry what to do next anymore.

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To go through the story line as a whole chronologically:

Negotiating for seat

On the trip out. We see them see the ads, and then begin to form their group as they get on the same plane. That’s probably improbable: there are many improbabilities, including the idea such people could thrive in this half-rundown hotel taken over by a third son, Sonny Kapur (Dev Patel) who is trying to break away from a family group, and especially a dictatorial mother, Mrs Kapoor (Lillete Dubey) who seeks to stifle him because he is not the eldest.

The group forms — before our very eyes — on their way

Once arrived, we see them all coping, sometimes well (Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson start out strong), or not well, as individuals (Celie Imrie joins a super-expensive mostly white club) and as a group.

Jean Ainsley indignant at the difference between the hotel as pictured in the brochure and its reality

Mrs Hardcastle takes over Sonny’s room because it has a door. Norman does exercises in his home-made shower, sets up his transistor radio high on the roof on a clothesline.

We have experienced the long journey there and now watch each person setting him or herself up and then their gradual adjustment individually and as a group. Until near the end much of it (if you accept the story’s faery frame) make sense and are touching. It’s people getting used to a different life — and their age matters, their looks. At the same time a story of a young Indian couple with a tough mother or prospective mother-in-law and equally tough older brother for the young heroine ensues. Real emotions are brought out.

The courtyard with Norman on the lounger and Mr Dashwood come to sit in the swing

As Izzy says, Penelope Wilton as Jean has the most thankless role. She is the middle-aged woman who is tired of her long-sufferingly kind but mechanically incompetent indeed self-deprecating husband, Douglas. She endlessly complains. He agrees with her the “sodding” flat they would have been reduced to in the UK won’t do, but does not agree that the way to endure life in India is to sit in a chair not going out, reading a book and hoping for English grilled food for dinner.

One of the pleasanter shots of Jean with Douglas on the other side and Mrs Hardcastle inbetween

She makes the mistake of semi-falling for Mr Dashwood who turns out to be gay. We are in fairy tale land, and as Bill Nighy’s culminating (reproachful) speech to Penelope Wilton makes explicit, the film tells us, make the best of things, do your best and don’t worry about it, and, well why not be cheered, why not show the better or happier face for yourself and others too. The movie is self-reflexive.

Mr Dashwood talking quietly, the actor dressed as the character explains he’s gay (not in the film)

The key note moving story is that of Mr Dashwood, Graham (Tom Wilkinson), the gay seeking the young gay Indian young man he left behind 40 years ago. He seems at first to be just wandering about. Taking the place in. He plays cricket with some street boys. But he is doing something, researching day after day in a Records Office. Graham finally finds the name of the young man whom he last saw disgraced and has imagined lived a hard ashamed life. He goes to meet him, Evelyn and Douglas backing him there.

In fact his friend has been happier than Graham, with a wife who understood him (as Jean has not, at least not respected or appreciated Douglas). They hug so intensely and Douglas says the morning after spent that night talking. At this moment of fulfillment and peace Mr Dashwood dies. Izzy said that when someone is to die, it is often the homosexual person. I had not noticed and she may be right. Wilkinson plays the part with such dignity, we grieve at his loss. His ashes are scattered in the Ganges by his friend. But it is true we are deprived of a happy homosexual couple at the film’s end. Only heterosexuality is celebrated in the last moments.

The Judith (Lucy Robinson), the eighth lonely soul is Norman’s new partner, found in the same expensive club Mrs Hardcastle joined: Mrs Hardcastle is never explained; could be a quiet lesbian but we are not told this

After Mr Dashwood’s death we have the denouement. A slowly building story is that of Sonny and Sunaina (Tena Desae). Sunaina works for her brother as a telephone answering highyl-educated person. The brother does not respect Kapoor but his sister loves him. She agrees to go to bed with him, but when she comes to the hotel late at night, strips and moves to what she thinks is his bed, she finds herself in bed with Mrs Hardcastle. Mrs Hardcastle refused the room assigned her because it lacked a door. Kapoor’s mother comes in and thinks Sunaina is a prostitute. Over the arch of the story, with a little help from Mrs Donnelly reading the records, Kapoor wins his right to renovate and keep the hotel up and last scene the pair of them are in their bike driving into the horizon:

I don’t want to give away the final still or moment. Suffice to say that this is such a sheer moment of unexpected joy at the end for another newly formed couple there was a kind of startled stillness in the movie matched by a stillness in the audience. It’s touch and go: the chance to try again for love is almost lost. Let me say just say it’s pulled off because Douglas gets to the plane hanger too late after Jean sends him back to the hotel to go on herself:

Mr Ainsley has his dreams too (an early Austen-like film with him as father is an adaptation of Jodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle) (this is not in the film, but from the feature)

Many wry jokes. It’s an intelligent entertainment. We are told of India’s poverty, the caste system, see a little of it, but the accent is on the color, noise and there’s a sort of fun folk rendition of the sort of song that is typical of Bollywood films. The writer of the originating story or novel is Deborah Moggach, who wrote the screenplay for Wright’s 2005 P&P. The director is John Madden and the brilliant script by Ol Parker.

A kiss

Closing

Ellen