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Friday, May 4, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Hotel Discounts Await Viewers Of This Best Exotic
Mess Hall
Tena Desae as Sunaina and Dev Patel as Sonny in John Madden's "The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel".
Fox Searchlight Pictures
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Friday, May 4,
2012
So what do you do with a
cast of fine British actors headlined by the good Dame Judi Dench? You
ill-advisedly stick them in a film that uneasily mixes comedy and drama with Ms.
Dench's narration in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", based on the Deborah
Moggach novel These Foolish Things.
Six senior-aged Brits -- a heartbroken gay man, a bickering married couple, a
widow, a single woman, a licentious eccentric and a bitter racist find
themselves on a trip out of cloudy, gloomy England to a retirement center in
India where relaxation and a slowdown life await. Of course it won't be easy,
and John Madden's comedy-drama often feels too caricatured and wooden to be
alive. The style is pedestrian, the outcome predictable. (I haven't read the
book, which is said to be quite good, but if true, the results on screen are
certainly lost in translation.) Still, "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", for
all of its varying faults, is several steps up from
"Salmon Fishing
In The Yemen", which tried to be charming, funny and dramatic but
succeeded at failing on all levels. At least in some measure, "Best Exotic"
tries and does produce a few funny moments of dialogue.
The introduction of the film's characters takes a full five minutes, and we will
be sure of one thing: along the way someone will be left behind, or heaven
forbid, keel over. In a film about aging, recapturing youth, and taking on new
spontaneous adventures in life's twilight years someone is sure not to keep up
with the blinding, zig-zag pace of this sometimes vibrant, colorful sojourn.
Mr. Madden, who directed Ms. Dench to an Oscar in "Shakespeare In Love", again
spotlights the Dame, and her performance as the widow Evelyn is rich, poignant
and open-hearted. Amidst the clowning (Dev Patel as Sonny, the invigorated and
hyper-caricatured Marigold hotel manager) and Ronald Pickup as a sex-starved
Lothario Sr. there's a heartfelt bit of work by Bill Nighy (Ms. Dench's co-star
and antagonist in
"Notes On A Scandal") as Douglas, a man
suffocated by the naggings of his miserable wife (Penelope Wilton). Mr. Nighy
does better than almost every actor around in conveying a sense of despair,
failure, longing and exasperation in a character, and he and Ms. Dench are the
sole reasons to watch Mr. Madden's film if at all.
That said, "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" suffers from a lack of appreciable
dimension and substance in its characters, and the approach to its storytelling
is scattershot and unfocused. There are multiple stories that Mr. Madden and
screenwriter Ol Parker try to juggle in even measure. At times the stories are
engaging and smartly acted but mostly -- especially in the film's second hour --
they become exhausting, falling prey to the trappings of expediency, with
needless twists and an introduction of a new character late on that feels tacked
on.
Mr. Madden's directing authorship was most recently seen last August on American
movie screens in
"The Debt", another disappointing film that suffered from issues with
length and the miscasting of both Sam Worthington and Tom Wilkinson, the latter
of whom appears in "Marigold". Here, Mr. Wilkinson looks as if he's in a
different film from his fellow cast members, his Graham a pondering, agonized
gay man searching for precious memories of the past. Graham offers up a line
that isn't as funny as it was perhaps intended to be: "these days I'm gay in
theory rather than in practice." The self-referencing is spoken with such
dreariness and compromise that the resulting laugh is stifled rather than
genuine.
For all Graham's thoughtfulness and sincerity the line he speaks undoes his
integrity as a gay man. (I know the film is a comedy but when is the last time
you heard a gay man say that he was gay in theory???) In Graham as a character
there's a sense of manipulation and vacancy. He seems too smart and assured to
be as confused as his character is. A retired judge, Graham initially looks a
happy and content man but the opposite is true. The canvas Graham operates on
seems to sink beneath him; there's a sense that he's on his own private island
just waiting to be flooded in sorrow.
Even with the film's waywardness the actors do well, including the engaging Mr.
Patel, but Maggie Smith's one-note racist character's third-act transformation
just didn't work. Ms. Smith was good in the role but Mr. Parker's screenplay
has her silent epiphany occur in the blink of an eye and for reasons that just
weren't convincing. Lack of conviction are the best words to sum up "The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel", a tedious one-night's stay at your local multiplex.
With: Lucy Robinson, Celia Imrie.
"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture
Association Of America for sexual content and language. The film's running time
is two hours and four minutes.
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