The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - review

New life: Judi Dench plays a recently widowed British woman who moves to India to work in a call centre
10 April 2012

Deborah Moggach is a subtler writer than this star-laden version of her book These Foolish Things might suggest. But since the cash-strapped Brit pensioners who find themselves "outsourced" to India at a fraction of the usual retirement price include Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and Ronald Pickup, there's fun to be had just watching them.

Here India is presented as a country full of lovable but slightly crazy people whom our band of veterans, themselves not lacking in eccentricity, view with some suspicion but gradually grow to accept. The story has been turned into an often farcical comedy, the dark side of which is only apparent if you look hard and long enough.

John Madden is the director and Ol Parker wrote the screenplay - one would rather Moggach had done it herself. "Come back James Ivory and Ismail Merchant" was the cry of one critic after the press screening. It's one of those films intent on taking the easy way out of almost every dramatic turn.

Dench plays a recent widow who gets a job in a call centre just in time to make her feel alive again; Smith is a veteran housekeeper who has come to India to have a hip replacement despite the fact that she doesn't trust the local doctors and finds curry inedible. Wilkinson is a high court judge who turns out to be gay, with a long lost and now married Indian lover; Nighy and Penelope Wilton are a quarrelsome couple who ought to have parted long ago, and Pickup and Celia Imrie are just two unfortunates looking rather desperately for the comfort of love, or at least sexual attention.

Unfortunately, the Indians are chiefly represented by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame. He plays, or rather is asked to overplay, the cheeky chappie owner-manager of the shabby Marigold Hotel, anxiously waiting for the money to refurbish before his foreign guests decide to go home again. He's the kind of cliché Indian Bollywood might offer us. It is, perhaps, more the adaptation's fault than his own.

How each of the guests finds some sort of equilibrium is the general thrust of the film.

There is a small surprise at the end that isn't entirely convincing, and the whole film pursues its way affectionately enough down the path of sentimentality and facile comedy-drama as if that's all we could possibly want. Only Wilkinson as the sad gay judge transcends it.

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