THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL: guests who won't leave but will check out

'Slumdog Millionaire' it ain't.
Although both films share the same star, Dev Patel, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL offers a very different view of India.
It's a view which barely even scratches the surface of this multi-faceted country. This surprisingly old-fashioned 2012 drama ignores the many complexities and contrasts in wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, in favour of a superficial tourist guide take which touches on all the appropriate stereotypes without exploring any of them in any depth.
And it does it all with such charm and good humour that I almost feel bad for criticising it.
TBEMH is a delightful viewing experience peopled by some of British cinema's finest actors and offering up a cast of characters that are so endearingly old school British they could almost have wandered in from the set of a Merchant-Ivory production.

Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Ronald Pickup are so damned good at what they do that you just want to ignore the one dimensional and stereotypical representation of their adopted homeland.
The chaos and the colour that is India - check.
The delights of spicy food - check.
Copious references to numerous crumbling temples and palaces - check.
Kids playing cricket on a patch of wasteland, using makeshift bat and wickets - check.
At least one Indian who adds humour with his use of flowery, old fashioned English - check.
True love versus arranged marriage - check.
The brief acknowledgment of a vast underclass of 'untouchables' who live in unimaginable poverty - check.
Humanise that underclass to give the impression they're ok with their lot in life - check.
and so it goes on.
It's difficult to avoid the impression that all India really needs to sort out the chaos is a bunch of elderly white westerners because no matter what the Indians have managed to achieve on their own there's nothing that can't be improved upon by the knowledge, experience and worldview of Maggie Smith or Judi Dench, or at least the characters they play.

TBEMH is not a film about India but about the country and its culture as filtered through the differing experiences of a group of elderly white British citizens who've been lured east by the alluring website for the titular residential hotel. It promises them the opportunity to see out their years in the comparatively low cost splendour of a luxury hotel catering to their every whim. The reality is rather different and it's the adjustments in expectations forced upon the guests that the story focuses on, plus their own relationships, or the lack of them. Some are lonely and looking for love, one couple struggle with the growing realisation that their 40 year marriage has reached the end of the road, while a retired high court judge returns to city of his childhood in search of a lost love.
To the extent that India has a culture which is different from the one they are used to back home in Blighty, it does have an impact on how their stories play out but it could just as easily have been Italy, Spain, Kenya or Thailand. The fact that everything happens in India is incidental to the main thrust of the narrative.
It's the top-notch cast that lifts this story to heights it doesn't really deserve to scale and make it possible to overlook the many shortcomings. They're a class act combo and give the lie to the oft-asserted claim that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.