Outsourcing gets a new twist in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a likable if market-driven ensemble comedy about a pack of cash-poor British elders who ship out for India, hoping for one last stab at self-renewal in a supposedly glam hotel.
The lonely seniors have two things in common: the usual big-screen bucket-list array of wishes for love, sex, closure and adventure — or at a minimum, retirement without total penury — and the fact that they’re all played by the cream of today’s British acting talent, albeit mostly operating below full steam.
Beyond that, the members of this disappointed crew, stranded in the decrepit ruins of a formerly grand mansion, fall into one of two categories you’ve met many a time before: Englishmen abroad (rarely a pretty sight) and affirmative life-lovers who are up for anything. (No prizes whatsoever for guessing where Maggie Smith, our reigning queen of Grumpy and Surly, lands.) Resplendent in a pungent lower-middle class twang and bags of belligerent attitude, Smith plays Muriel, a former nanny whose bitterness at having been thrown on the trash heap by her former employers has brought out the robust xenophobe in her.
She’s come to a place where the aged are cherished rather than consigned to oblivion, luckily — but Muriel has come to India unwillingly, and she has no faith in the long-suffering Indian surgeons who capably replace her hip at bargain rates, or in the Untouchable domestic who shows her a kindness her own family has never done.
Matching Smith kvetch for kvetch is the great Penelope Wilton as a snooty, luxury-loving matron who, despite the enormous advantage of being married to Bill Nighy, refuses to leave the hotel for fear of contamination by the great unwashed of Jaipur.