John Madden (2011)
I must have seen the trailer a dozen times in early 2012. Most of it made me wince but one moment always raised a smile – when the character played by Judi Dench says, ‘I just need some water’, drains a glass on the table before her, is told ‘That was a gin and tonic’ and replies, with difficulty, ‘I know that now’. In the middle of the crummy, obvious jokes in the rest of the trailer, Judi Dench makes this one seem real as well as amusing. Even so, I decided not to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for health reasons: in Richmond, the fumes of complacency given off by viewers of a film about white, middle-class Englishmen-and-women-abroad and featuring, along with Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy, would be suffocating. Getting on for three years later, I recorded the television premiere from the safety of our living room.
John Madden and the screenwriter Ol Parker, whose script is an adaptation of a 2004 novel by Deborah Moggach, are very sure of their audience, and of how to press its buttons. The series of little prologues that introduce the main characters allow them and us to react to, for example, (a) phone calls from call centres in India, (b) investing in offspring’s internet business and seeing its failure blow a hole in life savings, (c) the exploitation of grandparents as babysitters, (d) frustration with declining sexual performance, (e) the length of NHS waiting lists and (f) the increasing numbers of non-white hospital workers. The last of these items on the checklist is clearly the most unpleasant and also a good example of how the film works. The racism is expressed by an elderly woman called Muriel, who needs a hip replacement. Because she’s played by Maggie Smith, viewers so inclined can laugh along with Muriel’s racist vehemence but reassure themselves that it’s Smith’s vocal and facial exaggeration that they’re enjoying – as well as feel confident that Muriel will see the error of her racist ways and learn to be nice to Indians before the film ends. In other words, what Muriel says about British Asian nurses and doctors is a bit of harmless fun! The script works the comic racism for as long as it reasonably can – longer, in fact. Even after travelling from the airport in India in a bus packed full of natives, Muriel, on arrival at the eponymous hotel, retreats from a room and whispers in horror, ‘There’s an Indian in there …’
It’s not quite clear how Muriel gets racism out of her system but it turns out that she has a head for figures: once she takes over the book-keeping at the chaotic Marigold Hotel, she transforms its future prospects and her own. These Indians may be amusing and endearing in their way but they need a bit of English gumption to get things sorted! The characterisation of India, both the country and the people, is offensive throughout, even when Madden and Parker don’t (presumably) mean it to be: this is a land of wonderful, vibrant colours and Life but mind the food if you’ve a sensitive stomach. The comedy around the indigenous characters – chiefly the hotel manager, Sonny Kapoor (the willing but wooden Dev Patel) – makes you cringe. The resolution of Sonny’s love affair with call centre worker Sunaina (Tina Desae) is patronising in its straightforwardness: it only takes an old servant to say something to Sonny’s mother (Lillete Dubey), who’s meant to be implacably opposed to her son’s choice of girl, to change Mrs Kapoor’s mind.
She’s emotionally simple, compared with Brits like Douglas Ainslie (Bill Nighy) and his wife Jean (Penelope Wilton): unhappily married for thirty-nine years, these two can’t transform themselves so easily. The only other ‘complex’ relationship in the story is centred on Graham (Tom Wilkinson), a High Court judge who retires in order not just to return to the country in which he grew up but also to track down the Indian man with whom he was in love when they were both adolescents. The screenplay’s attitude towards a situation that’s harder to solve than the pat conclusions that are reached wherever possible is to get rid of one of the causes of complication: once he meets up again with his lost love, Graham dies, apparently content, of a conveniently swift heart attack. News that the Ainslies’ daughter is suddenly able to repay the money she owes her parents for bankrolling her internet venture means that Jean can return to England while Douglas stays on in India.
The talents of the actors are a mixed blessing. As Evelyn, who left it to her husband to run their lives only to discover, on his death, that their debts are so large the family home will need to be sold, Judi Dench, as usual, creates a complete character and stays completely in that character. One of the many great things about Dench is that she never condescends to what she’s in or who she’s playing, however beneath her gifts they may be. As in the television sitcoms A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By (both, it should be said, preferable to this film), Judi Dench remains as humanly truthful as she’s expertly comic: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel purports to be a ‘comedy-drama’ and, in Dench’s acting, there’s a complete fusion between those two aspects. The only encounter omitted from the film which I wish had been included is between Evelyn and the wife of the Indian whom Graham loved. I can’t find the name of this character or therefore of the actress who plays her but the look in the woman’s eyes when she sees Graham and her husband embrace stands comparison with Michelle Williams’s reaction to the reunion of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain. After Graham has died, Evelyn goes to find out from this woman what she knew about her husband’s sexual past. A conversation between Judi Dench and the actress playing the wife would have been worth seeing and hearing.
To be fair to Maggie Smith, she does, from the start, suggest that Muriel’s racist hostility is steeped in fearfulness (and without her lines, as written, supplying anything to support this interpretation). Yet Smith maintains a distance from the working-class woman she’s playing – I think this is one reason why she’s not the artist that Judi Dench is. Penelope Wilton’s anxiety as the desperate, humourless Jean Ainslie is upsetting: the discrepancy between the intensity of the actress’s playing and the crudeness of the character makes for uncomfortable viewing. Bill Nighy’s wry long-sufferingness as Jean’s husband is a shade too self-aware but he’s good when Douglas the worm turns: Nighy briefly breaks out of his practised languidness into something rawer. Tom Wilkinson does creditably as Graham, even though you have to grit your teeth as he describes the ending of his young love. Celia Imrie, as Madge (a woman looking to add to her total of husbands) and Ronald Pickup, as Norman (the past-his-sell-by-date Lothario), complete the group of expatriates. Both are likeable, neither is given enough to do: the neat packaging of the characters is hardest to take when the writing of them is so thin.
The title of the source novel is These Foolish Things: I don’t know if the famous song of that name has any significance in Deborah Moggach’s book (and I won’t be reading it to find out). But invoking a song of its vintage confers on the material a built-in nostalgic quality. ‘These Foolish Things’ was first a hit in 1937, when most of the actors playing the hotel guests in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel weren’t even born. The song doesn’t feature on the soundtrack, which has a melodic albeit standard issue Indian-style score by Thomas Newman, but the flavour of the book’s title connects with other elements of the film. The age difference of the main white actors is nearly twenty years (between Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, both born in 1935, and Celia Imrie, born in 1952). Fair enough, but the names of the people these actors are playing don’t take account of this generational range. How many women now aged sixty, as Imrie’s character seems meant to be, are called Madge? How many men of Ronald Pickup’s age (seventy-one when the film was released) are Normans? (Having Madge and Norman among the dramatis personae naturally brings to my mind The Dresser, in which the owners of those two names would have been born around the start of the twentieth century.) It’s revealed that Maggie Smith’s Muriel’s jaundiced outlook is due largely to having spent her working life as a housekeeper-cum-nanny before being passed over for a younger model: of course this is entirely possible but the ‘in service’ connotations of Muriel’s life are naturally associated with a more distant past. Made for $10m, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel currently has box-office takings worldwide of nearly $137m. Much of that money must be the ‘grey pound’ and its overseas equivalents. The film-makers want members of their primary target audience to identify with the characters in the story: they immediately tap into features of older people’s lives today which may trouble or annoy and there are likely to be many in the audience who share with the people on screen a sense of disappointment with how things have turned out and are drawn to the possibility of the new life the hotel guests experience. Yet it seems to be part of the undoubted appeal of the film that it also conveys – through Madge and Norman and Muriel and, indeed, the whole British-in-India element -a spurious, comforting sense of antiquity.
9 November 2014
