Trailer Trash: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
By Samuel Hoelker
May 8, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The trailer begins with some of the most familiar elderly British actors working today finding out about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement community in India. Bill Nighy says that it’s like Florida, but with more elephants. Next, our friends are in a crowded bus, and Bill Nighy, being the gentleman I’m sure he also is in real life, offers Maggie Smith some food, but she turns it down because she can’t pronounce it, while none of the other passengers on the bus seem to get offended. Tom Wilkinson then tells Judi Dench that their time will be extraordinary, but then Dev Patel shows up and the hotel isn’t what they thought it would be! It’s run down, birds fly around everywhere, and Penelope Wilton and Bill Nighy stand next to each other, reminding me of Shaun of the Dead. Dev Patel then gives proverbial advice.
Judi Dench, in a voice over, begins to adapt to the new culture. She has a job, and there’s an old person sex joke. Bill Nighy then shares the screen with her and possibly flirts. Penelope Wilton doesn’t understand how Tom Wilkinson likes India, but he says that it teaches him something (you’ll have to see the movie to find out what!). Maggie Smith is given food as a gesture of thanks, and she refuses it because she’s racist. Dev Patel says that once the hotel is fixed up, people will refuse to die…but then someone keels over! All of them, in a bus, narrowly avoid collision, and then Judi Dench downs a gin and tonic. And what Fox Searchlight trailer would be complete without a necrophilia joke to cap it off?
I’ve worked at movie theaters that specialize in art-house, foreign, and independent films for the past eight years. I know that the average age of the customer is 87, the amount of entitlement is huge, and that anything with Judi Dench is a blockbuster. Now imagine a movie that not only has Judi Dench but her close friends Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, and Bill Nighy, as well as having jokes pertaining to being 87 while making the audience feel good about themselves by being white in a non-white nation. There’s no movie more suited to an art-house crowd than The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It’s the Avengers of the specialty cinema world. We’ve had preview screenings where I’ve seen 300 people constantly in stitches and our trailers have been worn out because they’ve been played so much. I had been dreading this release for a long time. Unfunny, obvious lines, neo-colonialism, and old people having sex are three things that turn me off from a film.
One common audience reaction I’ve heard is, “I couldn’t stop grinning for the entire movie.” I cracked no smile. Its jokes fall flat to a 23-year-old’s sense of humor. There needs to be more to a joke than “old person reading Kama Sutra” or “Tom Wilkinson playing cricket” in order to make it, well, a joke. The humor is for the oblivious and the easily-amused. Oh, and the culturally unaware, since there are also jokes about how Indian food is different from western food.
Oh, speaking of culturally unaware, it’s as western-centric as you would think from the trailer. I thought that after Slumdog Millionaire did enough to demonize India, we’d be free of white British filmmakers detailing life in India. Instead, we have to learn again that India is dirty and its food crazy. While the characters slowly adapt to life in India, the film doesn’t. It treats its customs not with curiosity and respect, but with its chin up; so much so, that things seem out of place due to lack of context. For example, Maggie Smith gives advice to a worker at the hotel. The worker is so overwhelmed that Maggie Smith (who, by the way, is racist. Her racism is played for laughs. Really. People laughed when she said, “No matter how hard he washes, he won’t get the color off” when talking about a black doctor whose help she refused. Sympathetic to her plight yet?) paid attention to her that she invites Maggie Smith over to her house. The scene is awkward and unjustified; it’s not told from a “let’s compare British to Indian customs” point of view. The tone is of a “can you believe that people do this?” point of view. It’s a misguided way to handle a film that hinges so greatly on the merging of two separate cultures.
But the weirdest part of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is that it’s not bad. Despite its xenophobic handlings, its lame humor, its padded runtime, and its plot contrivances (thinking back on it…how DID they find out about the hotel?), the actors are so goddamn charming that they’re almost hard to resist. While Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy are a guarantee to be the highlight of whatever they’re in, Judi Dench puts in a nuanced, deep performance that, for me at least, was strengthened by the fact that she’s now almost totally blind. Even Maggie Smith, whose character is possibly the worst character since Hans Landa, puts her all into her role. It’s not her fault her character is terribly written.
Something that’s a little impressive about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is that a few times, it goes in unexpected directions, and handles the turns in a way that’s actually true both to how life works as well as the film’s universe. It’s genuinely surprising based on the pedestrian screenplay for the rest of the film, and it makes me wonder how much better this movie would have been if such care were put into the other aspects of it.
My summary of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: if you’re already excited to see it based off of the trailer, you’ll definitely love it. If the trailer puts you off in extreme ways like it did to me, I won’t begrudge you if you don’t see it. But if you do, you’ll realize that this movie isn’t as bad as it really should be.