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Seven pensioners board a plane from England to India in this last-chance-at-love travelogue. I’d call it “Eat Gray Love,” myself, but that’s why I don’t work in marketing.
Part of the joke of this comedy-drama — ably directed by John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) — is that the title isn’t entirely truth in advertising. The brochure advertising The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful turns out to be a beneficiary of Photoshop. Rundown and lacking in amenities (in the case of one room, a door), the spot isn’t the best, but it is a hotel and exotic, and there’s no turning back for the strangers who become the place’s first guests.
As adapted by Ol Parker from Deborah Moggach’s novel “These Foolish Things,” the film has more story than it can seat comfortably, but the actors paint in the crudely sketched characters. Judi Dench makes for an entirely loveable leading lady, heading up the ensemble and narrating the picture as Evelyn, recently widowed but unwilling to be patronized by her children. She’s joined by retired judge Graham (Tom Wilkinson), bitter racist Muriel (Maggie Smith), uncomfortable couple Douglas and Jean (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton), take-charge gal Madge (Celia Imrie) and randy Norman (Ronald Pickup).
Though the picture cozies up to plenty of cliches, it has this going for it: The course of the film’s romances isn’t immediately apparent (partly owing to one character being gay, “nowadays more in theory than in practice”). The conclusions may not all be foregone, but more than once we’re instructed: “Everything will be all right in the end. And if it is not all right, it is not yet the end.”
The story comes down firmly in favor of plucky (Luddite Evelyn starts a blog and begins a new career coaching telemarketers) and against sour sticks-in-the-mud (Jean’s pessimism about “the climate, the squalor, the poverty”). Of course, Muriel learns that India isn’t just “brown faces and black arts — reeking of curry,” so much so that she becomes instrumental in saving the day for the hotel’s young and in-over-his-head proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire”).
Young and old all get some sort of romantic or sexual action, but more broadly the message is to “seize the gray” — err, day. Just by making the leap to India, the heroes are all winners, and each commits to further steps forward, illustrating Dench’s voiceover conclusion: “All we know about the future is that it will be different.”
Each plot seems underserved (despite the two-hour running time) and the whole enterprise too platitudinous, but with powerhouse actors like Dench, Nighy and Wilkinson, even a critic can agree it’s better to be plucky than a stick-in-the-mud.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language. 2 hours, 4 minutes.
By Peter Canavese
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language. 2 hours, 4 minutes.
By Peter Canavese
