The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a wonderful twisting and turning maze of a film (like the maze of Jaipur's markets with their frenetic chaos and gorgeous burst of color), with seven distinct, charming, annoying, frustrating, endearing, wise, colorful Brits and several equally distinct, charming, etc. etc. Indians whose lives we miraculously learn all about, care about, get angry at, shed a tear with, laugh with...and at, and ultimately wish them all enduring happiness during the precious waning or waxing years of their lives.
Seeing this film in a NYC theatre filled with people like myself - gray-haired, yet often feeling like 18-year-olds, despite what the mirror too often tells us, we were laughing up a storm, shedding those tears, and embracing the meaning and message of this film. ABOUT TIME there's another movie for us "Golden Oldies"!! Are there a few clichés a la "Enchanted April", or a few moments where it is necessary to suspend belief and accept the fantasy like "Forrest Gump"? You Bet! But that can be the magic of cinema! To get lost in a fantasy, to treasure an adventure in a foreign land, to listen to wizened, but wise people, flawed, some more than others, knocked about by life, but with the fortitude to realize that it is not over until it's over!
Like the classic movies of the 70's such as "Harold and Maude" and "King of Hearts", there are so many delectable bits of dialogue or wonderful sound bites that just shine with wisdom and understanding at the Divine Comedy of life: Graham waxing rhapsodic over the "Light, Colors, Smiles"of his cherished India, saying that "It teaches me something!"; Evelyn's simple declaration that "India, like Life itself, I suppose, is what you bring to it", and the goofy, eternally optimistic Sonny intoning with youthful wisdom that "Everything will be all right in the end, so if it is not all right, it is not yet the end!". One walks out of the film enchanted--with India, with these lovely cast of characters, so beautifully and vividly sketched by a stellar British ensemble, and with optimism that Everything WILL be all right in the end!"
Seeing this film in a NYC theatre filled with people like myself - gray-haired, yet often feeling like 18-year-olds, despite what the mirror too often tells us, we were laughing up a storm, shedding those tears, and embracing the meaning and message of this film. ABOUT TIME there's another movie for us "Golden Oldies"!! Are there a few clichés a la "Enchanted April", or a few moments where it is necessary to suspend belief and accept the fantasy like "Forrest Gump"? You Bet! But that can be the magic of cinema! To get lost in a fantasy, to treasure an adventure in a foreign land, to listen to wizened, but wise people, flawed, some more than others, knocked about by life, but with the fortitude to realize that it is not over until it's over!
Like the classic movies of the 70's such as "Harold and Maude" and "King of Hearts", there are so many delectable bits of dialogue or wonderful sound bites that just shine with wisdom and understanding at the Divine Comedy of life: Graham waxing rhapsodic over the "Light, Colors, Smiles"of his cherished India, saying that "It teaches me something!"; Evelyn's simple declaration that "India, like Life itself, I suppose, is what you bring to it", and the goofy, eternally optimistic Sonny intoning with youthful wisdom that "Everything will be all right in the end, so if it is not all right, it is not yet the end!". One walks out of the film enchanted--with India, with these lovely cast of characters, so beautifully and vividly sketched by a stellar British ensemble, and with optimism that Everything WILL be all right in the end!"