John Madden's The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel is a piece of palatable racial condescension that
cashes in on the Slumdog Millionaire
craze a couple years too late, though perhaps it's appropriate given the film's
overlying theme of aging. Madden's
comedy-drama about retirees being outsourced to India "“ that's the entire joke
"“ doesn't offer anything of value to the typical early-year "elderly gone wild"
genre unless Viagra gags and Judi Dench struggling to work a computer sounds
like a heartwarming time at the movies.
The respectable cast lowering themselves to this spectacle
is comprised of the aforementioned Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope
Wilton, Ronald Pickup, Celia Imrie, and Maggie Smith, all playing pensioners
who decide to take a chance and visit the titular retreat, which turns out to
be less grandiose than advertised "“ isn't India just filthy, the film
rhetorically asks? Loosely
managing the struggling hotel is young Sonny Kapoor, played by Dev Patel as if
every punchline he delivers will be his last, who battles with his
stereotypically restrictive mother, a woman that dares not believe in the power
of Love. People will fall in love;
everything will turn out alright, and there will be a single tragic incident
telegraphed an hour prior. There's
nothing new under the sun.
Ultimately the only thing carrying the film from scene to
scene is the prestige of its performers.
Notably, Dench plays vulnerable against her recent typecasting as a
hard-nosed, no-nonsense character, while Wilkinson and Nighy ascend above their
simplistic subplots. All of these
performers have turned in great performances in better films recently, though,
films that don't wistfully, lazily imagine a magical foreign land where
everyone's problems go away, that also smells, as Nighy's character says, like
elephant feces. What a grand tour.
