While young people are heading for theaters to watch The Avengers, the older set is showing up at other venues to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. That was the observation made in a review of the latter movie that I read a few days ago. I was relieved last night, therefore, to find a healthy mix of ages surrounding me as I watched Marigold Hotel (although admittedly the audience was more of a Midnight in Paris crowd than a bunch of Kick-Ass devotees).
If the movie has a theme, I suppose it would be an affirmation that you're never too old to grab hold of life and enjoy it. Or, as the hyper-enthusiastic, young Indian hotel owner (Dev Patel, of Slumdog Millionaire fame) puts it: "Everything works out in the end. If it doesn't, it isn't the end." In other words, yes, it's an optimistic film, one that causes you to leave the theater feeling a certain sense of buoyancy.
If I were reviewing the film, which I'm really not, I'd point out the brilliant acting by an all-star cast. And I'd describe in some detail the plot, beginning with the somewhat hackneyed premise of having a bunch of elderly Brits deciding -- for various reasons, including financial problems -- to respond to an advertisement for an allegedly luxurious retirement hotel (for "the elderly and the beautiful") in Jaipur, India, and then learning much about themselves through their interaction with India and with each other. Sort of a "shipwrecked on an island" scenario.
A major actor in the movie is India herself, or at least this film's depiction of India. The hapless Brits are forced not only to adjust to each other, but also to navigate a chaotic world that each finds -- depending on his or her personality -- exhilarating or hellish. Reviews have complained that the movie does not adequately reveal the true squalor and horror of Indian street life. I suspect such reviewers correspond to the character in the film who couldn't force herself to leave the safety of the hotel and walk out into the city.
In the few days I've spent visiting Delhi and Agra, I've wandered around the streets, fended off highly persistent touts, ignored frighteningly disfigured beggars, navigated in tuk tuks through impenetrable traffic, and eaten excellent food in highly questionable environments. While I'm sure there are sights that I haven't seen that would offend my sensitivities, I think the movie gives a pretty good picture of life in urban north India, at least as it would appear to a typical Western visitor. I can understand the fears of the woman locked in her hotel room -- but appreciate even more fully the sense by others in her group that India has brought them alive for the first time since they were very young.
Jaipur offered them so much to see -- not just landmark tourist sights, but simple street life as they went out to the neighborhood market. And, perhaps for British visitors especially, it offered immersion in a society where they no longer felt bound by the expectations that their own social set at home had imposed on them.
One woman complains, shortly after arriving, that she feels absurd. She wasn't some kid, she muttered, wandering through Asia on a year off from school. She felt constantly humiliated. But that sense of absurdity, that humiliation, come from the internalized voices of the people who had surrounded her at home, voices that told her how an elderly, middle class woman was supposed to feel, to react, to behave, to be treated by others. She could continue in that mindset -- a mindset that was keeping her bound up and unchallenged as she sat around awiting her eventual death -- or she could open herself to novelty, to the opportunity and necessity of learning, and to personal growth.
Fortunately, all but one of the hotel guests sooner or later selects the latter. The exception was one woman -- the one who was afraid to leave the hotel -- who realizes that she truly lacks the flexibility to make the necessary adjustment to an alien civilization. She leaves India (as well as her long-suffering husband), and returns to family in England.
Apart from the story, and the enjoyable but perhaps overly wishful moral of that story (would a group of untraveled, over-60 men and women really find happiness and fulfilling romance in a shabby hotel in India?), the Indian background is both beautiful and exciting and in itself makes the film worth viewing. I suspect that the film's popularity will cause an increase in India tourism. And the movie offers viewers a chance to preview their own reactions to a different society -- would you love India, or find it sufficiently frightening and distasteful that you wouldn't find the trip worthwhile?
For myself -- well, one of these days soon, I'm going to have to return to India, this time for a longer and more comprehensive visit.
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