Always on Sunday: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

We must have seen the preview of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011, directed by John Madden) six or eight times, and we enjoyed it every time. It seemed to be a comedy, and it featured seven companionable English actors we'd grown old with: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Ronald Pickup, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Celia Imrie—listed oldest first, all born within 12 years of each of us. (Dench is only nineteen days older than Smith, who will be 78 this December.)

    The Internet Movie Database synopsizes the film like this:

British retirees travel to [Jaipur] India to take up residence in what they believe is a newly restored hotel. Less luxurious than its advertisements, the Marigold Hotel nevertheless slowly begins to charm in unexpected ways.

And indeed it categorizes the film first as comedy and second as drama. But for me, drama predominates. Graham Dashwood (Wilkinson), a former high-court judge, has returned to India to look up an old lover, a man who suffered shame and rejection after their relationship become known forty years earlier and Dashwood returned to England. The man went on to marry and tell his wife all about it, so when Dashwood finally finds them, she knows who he is and honors her husband's gratitude at seeing his old friend again. When Dashwood dies a few days later, everyone attends his conventional Hindu funeral, watching all day as his body is burned on a pyre and his old friend pours his ashes into a river (either the Banas or the Banganga, presumably).
    Douglas and Jean Ainslie (Nighy and Wilton) were at odds even before all of the principals had seen the advertisement for the "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and ended up sitting in the same row of seats at the airport, and they continue at odds throughout the film, Douglas enjoying the sounds and smells and colors and adventures and Jean abhorring the germs and the disorder and the filth, remaining at the hotel to read mostly. At the end, as they try to get to the airport through the city's burgeoning streets to return to England, their Tuk-Tuk driver says he can take them both only if they leave their luggage behind—either that or take one of them with the luggage and leave the other behind. Jean insists that she must leave this disgusting country.
    Muriel Donnelly (Smith) has come to India only for a knee replacement....
    Norman Cousins (Pickup) and Madge Hardcastle (Imrie) seem to have come to India mainly in the hope of finding romance....

Perhaps, if you haven't yet availed yourself the opportunity to see this film, I've told you more than I should have. But the few things I've given away won't matter, the film has so much to offer, not least the giddily optimistic hotel proprietor, Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel, of Slumdog Millionaire), whose philosophy of life is that everything turns out well in the end, and if everything is not well yet, then it is not the end.
    Of course, if you wish I had told you even more about the characters and their subplots, you can read Wikipedia's detailed synopsis, or Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times, which includes the helpful observation,

This leisurely paced two-hour movie is a reasonably tasty banquet for the same Anglophiles who embrace Downton Abbey. Although it’s not as tidy or comfy as that self-congratulating fantasy of British noblesse oblige or as elevated as the Merchant-Ivory films set in India, it’ll do nicely.

We rented the DVD from Redbox.