Film review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

A FILM like this one works so strenuously to cater to its target audience’s needs that you half-expect the filmmakers to supply cosy cardies and fish oil capsules for everyone entering the cinema.

Based on Deborah Moggach’s frothy novel These Foolish Things, it follows the travails of a group of broke pensioners who dodge factory-farmed care homes in Blighty and fly out instead to Jaipur, where they have been promised a five-star retirement by a young hotel manager (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel). The reality turns out to be a (gorgeously) ramshackle dump, where the rag bag of retirees must face culture shocks, old memories and new love affairs.

At least the cast are well chosen, partly because they reprise versions of roles they’ve played for years. Penelope Wilton seems to have built a career around throttled spouses, whilst Dame Maggie Smith plays a racist ex-cleaner who drops politically incorrect observations with the asperity of a Downton dowager. Tom Wilkinson potters around, smiling enigmatically, Bill Nighy self-effaces modestly, Celia Imrie gold digs, and Dame Judi Dench’s recently bereaved widow grieves then glows, à la Mrs Brown. And then there’s Ronald Pickup as a randy old goat who bares his flesh in a way that will make you scream, and not in a Michael Fassbender way. Yet even this isn’t news because Pickup was doing fearless nudity as far back as A Time To Dance 20 years ago.

Some genteel homosexuality and the possibility of a budding romance between Dench and Nighy are the biggest stretches here, but the cast know their way around an artful nuance. Ol Parker’s script may reduce its characters to basic call-signs, but where others would mug, this lot are so classy that they demi-tasse.

I nearly dropped this film’s rating down to two stars because of Parker’s wearying habit of passing off hoary jokes as if newly minted. At one point Imrie challenges Pickup about a September-December affair, wondering aloud whether he is worried about having sex at their age. “If she dies, she dies,” he replies.

But as clumsy as the picture is, it does try to deliver certain movie pleasures that seem to have been neglected by other filmmakers. In the studios’ rush to court 18-30 males, few romantic melodramas make it to the multiplex any more – especially with a cast of sexagenarians and septuagenarians.

If only John Madden’s film was less cautious and conservative. The most unlikely speech comes from Wilton’s fed-up expat, who claims to find this India too exotic and foreign. It’s unlikely, because The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel feasts on cultural clichés as if they were a chicken tikka masala banquet. Within the first 30 minutes cricket-playing street kids, hair-raising traffic, spiritual enlightenment, arranged relationships, shonky plumbing and Delhi belly have all been ticked off the list.

At times, you wish the Marigold gaggle had decamped to France, where at least directors such as André Téchiné and Francois Ozon could have conjured more interesting adventures than sipping gin near a man with a full head of hair. Still, don’t be surprised if your gran loves this.

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (12A)

Director: John Madden

Running time: 124 minutes

Rating; ***

• On general release from Friday