June 20: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012 -- John Madden)

★★★

Susan K. and I, a neo- and proto-retiree, decided to check out the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for a weekday afternoon show, and we found the theater fairly crowded.  With similar moviegoers.  That’s the demographic for this fun film, and it punched all our buttons.

Not far into the film, I realized I’d seen it before.  Marigold Hotel is that movie that is set in a college dorm or among a group of college friends who are discovering themselves and having new life experiences, films like Cédric Klapisch’s L'auberge espagnole.  In Marigold Hotel, though, the characters are late middle-aged, and instead of transitioning into adulthood, they’re moving into late adulthood.  The key to this film is that its characters are going through the same process as those in the 20-somethings’ films, but these older people have a different context for their discoveries about life.  Some here have lost spouses and find themselves alone for the first time, making their own way in the larger world alone.  Some have to learn how to meet others and start relationships, while others have to come to the recognition that the relationship they have isn’t functional.  They cope with money problems, and since they’re in India, they have to learn how to deal with the large, unfamiliar world.  There’s even a gay character coping with coming out to his peers while also dealing with some unresolved issues from his past.  Change the age of the characters, and the film has the familiar feel of a group of young adults discovering the world.

A big part of the pleasure here is the way the maturity and life experience of the Marigold Hotel residents affects how they cope with their life discoveries.  Each of the characters has his own arc and each brings along the wisdom of a life lived, so although characters find surprises as they grow, they all have a lot of knowledge to use and to share.  They help the young hotel owner with his own transition into adulthood, and they apply the skills they’ve learned in their lives to improve the situations they find themselves in.  Marigold Hotel’s wisdom is in this point: The characters accept the challenge of a new environment and thus experience growth, but they have the wisdom of a lifetime to use, a tool not available to younger characters in films about young adults.  Of course, those young adults don’t have death quite as near or present, either.

This is a fun movie.  The TV background of director John Madden shows in many elements of the film: The story is conventional, and there aren’t a whole lot of surprises.  But Marigold Hotel is a film about personal growth and having life-changing experiences, and it refreshing to see that opportunity offered to older characters.