If you are an inveterate fan of Masterpiece Theater and
other high-end BBC programming shown on
PBS, congratulations! You’ve become a target audience. And The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel is aimed right at you. It’s got a great cast of A-list stars, an
A-list director, and an exotic locale. Indeed, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a
pleasant bit of fluffy entertainment, certainly good enough for an episode or
two of Masterpiece Classic ™, or more likely, Masterpiece Contemporary ™, but,
in my view, pretty thin as a feature film. If you like this sort of thing, you
might want to wait for the dvd.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Exotic Marigold
Hotel is the story of a disparate group of (relatively) elderly Englishpersons
who go off to start new lives in India, lured by enticing ads extolling the
beauty and luxury of the titular residential hotel “for the elderly and beautiful”,
only to discover, upon arrival, that the place is a run-down dump. So, its
stiff upper lip time, as our multifarious cast tries to cope with their new circumstances,
amusingly for the most part, but also melodramatically at times. It’s not just the “hotel” they must cope with,
you see, but the whole wondrous (“exotic”) and somewhat alien cultural milieu
in which they find themselves. For
example, it seems most of our travelers have never eaten Indian food before,
and being Brits, it’s hard for them to come out and say anything about the
level of attendant spicy heat. (How can one live in the modern UK and not
experience Indian cuisine, you ask? Here and elsewhere, you simply have to suspend disbelief.)
Luckily, everyone in town speaks English.
There is the joy of watching great and beloved actors: Maggie
Smith, Judy Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson are always terrific. The other
voyagers, somewhat less well known in this country, include Penelope Wilton (Isobel
Crawley in Downton Abbey), Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup, all veterans
of stage, screen and TV ( I remember Pickup as Prince Yakimov in 1987’s Fortunes of War). All do as much as they can with their characters, given the
constraints of this production. Part of the problem, you see, is that Marigold
Hotel labors mightily to give each member of the ensemble their due, with the
unfortunate consequence that none really gets to do very much, and all are
reduced to what might be called supporting roles; while no one really carries
the picture. And the eccentricities of some of those characters, notably Maggie
Smith’s “Muriel”, are overindulged by the writers ( I can’t blame Maggie). 
It seems that the designers were also concerned that a story
exclusively about oldsters might have limited box office appeal, so we get a
secondary story as well, starring Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) as Sonny,
the hotel’s young earnest and energetic proprietor, Tena Desae as Sonny’s
pretty girlfriend and Lillete Dubey (who played the mother in 2001’s excellent MonsoonWedding) as his meddlesome mother. This aspect of the tale is utterly
predictable, and despite the attractions of the actors, pretty superfluous.
The other star of Hotel is India itself, the countryside,
the marketplace, or, as Wilkinson’s character says, “the colour”. Definitely
some travelogue in there.
Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Debt (2011)) does the best he can with a thin, predictable screenplay. And
there are some cute, funny lines. Many of these were loaded into the trailer, so,
if you haven’t seen that – don’t.
In current release.
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