SCREEN
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
(12A) 124mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Heavy-handed and predictable, but this tale of grey-haired grouches "on a gap year" possesses a matchless ensemble of British talent.
REVIEW
Crumbling ruins seeking a new lease of life - such is the story of both the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its inhabitants in this genteel comedy drama with the cream of British acting talent showing the whipper-snappers how it's done.
The eponymous hotel is not as the seven retirees saw in the brochure but the chutzpah of naive owner Sonny (a joyous Dev Patel - "let me through, my brother is a doctor") and the vibrancy of the lifestyle of Jaipur is sufficient to persuade our magnificent seven to give it a go.
Each have left something behind, each is looking for answers and escape and, in a rather clod-hopping and formulaic fashion, they each get what they want or, at least, what they need.
The fact that the epiphanies come by rote and fall into place like a lock mechanism is down to the sheer practicality of events - seven people, seven journeys, seven moments of truth - make that eight if you include Sonny's soapy love story.
It necessarily means that everything is hurried, life-long prejudices vanish in an instant, everyone talks in urgent home-spun truths, the natives are poor but happy and culture clashes become culture cliches.
But if the story, unlike the cast, doesn't go anywhere unexpected, what better companions than these with whom to stand and stare at the dizzying joys of Jaipur.
Relish these names sharing the screen - Judi Dench, Maggie Smith ("I can't plan that far ahead. I don't even buy green bananas"), Tom Wilkinson, feuding couple Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup, Celia Imrie.
If anyone can go deeper than an easy-going script will allow it is these folk who scoop out crumbs of melancholy and hope and regret from unpromising cracks.
Director John Madden presumably sat back and watched these craftsmen and women go to work, safe in the knowledge that no-one would misfire.
And with a host of unselfish performances in the bag, he could concentrate on capturing the teeming riot of colour and noise that so frightens and charms the dry Brits.
From a land of call centres, health and safety and rain to this - a spice market of spirit and optimism where, as Wilkinson's Graham puts it "life is a privilege not a right".
Expect all your neighbourhood Shirley Valentines and Calendar Girls to be booking tickets east this year.
Yes, the film would have been better as a longform TV series. Yes, it meanders wildly and re-states the obvious as something insightful. Yes, everything gets too easy too quickly and sorted too smartly but there is no escaping the genial charm of this life-affirming story that sees gap year grouches discover that, yes, there is a chance of new life before death.
