Your Humble Blogger recently watched and enjoyed The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I enjoyed it! I want to emphasize the enjoyment, because I am going to gripe and carp and complain about those aspects that are less than ideal, and that is bound to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy it. Which I did. So that’s all right, d’y’see?
What am I going to complain about? Well, the main thing is that the plot of the movie is resolved—the orchard is saved!—without resort to a climactic cricket match between the elderly English residents and the villainous developers. Y’all think I’m kidding, don’t you. I’m not. The wonderful gay retired judge played by the wonderful Tom Wilkinson has a lovely scene where he coaches street kids and lets himself get clean bowled; it may be the best thing in the movie. He could have coached and coaxed the gang of them into a team, revealing unsuspected aspects of their characters culminating in Maggie Smith’s cranky racist getting out of her wheelchair to hit the last ball for six. Would that not be the most ut? I’m getting shivers just thinking about it.
Alas, Tom Wilkinson’s wonderful gay retired judge can achieve happiness only in death, crushed under the immense heteronormativity of the romcom. Disappointingly, we don’t get to see Bill Nighy windmilling his arms as he flings a googly; sadly, we don’t get to see Judy Dench giggling as she discovers that she has, in fact, caught the ball; crushingly, we don’t get to discover that Penelope Wilton was Top Girl at school and for all her faults is the best all-rounder anyone has ever seen. We don’t get to see Lillete Dubey as the mother of the young hotel manager gain a grudging respect for Tena Desae as his love interest. We don’t get to see Ron Pickup’s off-spin or Celia Imrie’s bouncers. Alas.
What do we get? Well, we get a bunch of terrific film actors doing their thing. Best of all is Bill Nighy, who is ZOMG terrific, and who, I believe, has radio controlled joints. And possibly facial muscles. At any rate, they don’t work the way other people’s do, and they are endlessly fascinating to watch. What a joy that man is. Judy Dench is luminous, of course, and very affecting in places. They are all good, every one of them. Which is good, because they haven’t been given much in the way of a screenplay, have they? So we’re pretty much enjoying the scenery—both the India-scenery and the scenery-chewing.
Other than the cricket-related disappointment, I do have two significant gripes. The first is that when Maggie Smith’s cranky racist character does eventually rise from her wheelchair to Save the Day, she does so by magically becoming neither cranky nor racist. Her horrible nature is overcome by exposure to a sweet and largely silent untouchable young char at the titular Hotel. Well, and by successful surgery—there’s the possibility for something there, that her over-the-top crankiness and indeed her racism could turn out to derive from chronic pain, and when the surgery relieves the chronic pain, it is in fact a character-changing miracle. I think pain relief is an underexplored area in our theater and cinema, myself, and I am not kidding about that, either. While magically being cured of racism by exposure to an unassuming and sweet dark-skinned woman is not really underexplored at this point.
The main problem, though, is that Maggie Smith’s character does in fact Save the Day. The wacky dark-skinned folk can’t possibly run a hotel, can they, without a Wise White to curb their hilarious (if picturesque) excesses. And while the character is the only hard-ass in the group, fine, the idea that her background in domestic service makes her peculiarly suited to running a hotel is nonsense. Completely unsatisfying. Nor is the issue that the locals needed cultural translation as much as the tourists do—in another terrible example, Judy Dench’s widow-without-pension seeks a job at a call center, and winds up getting hired as some sort of tutor and cultural bridge for the poor overworked saps answering technical support calls. She is hired by the floor manager when she explains to him the joys of dunking biscuits in tea; we see her in action only once, when she demonstrates not the cultural peculiarities of the British but the need for sympathy and rapport in salesmanship. Qualities, we are led to understand, that the locals are surprised to find helpful—and which the floor manager now encourages, despite the drop in efficiency, because Judy Dench is so luminous. And white.
I happen to have read a couple of things recently where the business is saved because a Sensible Person takes it over, despite the business plan being originally foolish or even fraudulent. When the Sensible Person runs it, though, and puts it on a Sound Footing, we are led to understand that it all works just fine. The problem wasn’t the fraud, or the fact that the whole idea was crazy to begin with, or more to the point that most business do in fact fail and that starting a business is an inherently risky and difficult venture within our current capitalist system. No, the problem was that the person running it was the wrong person, and once the Sensible Person takes over the same business that the wrong person set up in no time they will be turning a profit, hiring the previously unemployable and revitalizing the entire neighborhood. Huzzah! Crap.
And when the wrong person is, you know, dark of hue, and the Sensible Person is, well, white… and when the Sensible White Person comes from a former colonial power and is in the former colony… you have perpetuation of some very harmful cultural models, you do. And I think that the film-makers were confident that they had addressed that, what with having the racist character spew racist bile and showing everybody uncomfortable with it (and the younger white folk actually express that discomfort!) and then having her learn that the brown folk aren’t so bad after all. I suspect that the film-makers did not notice that the overt racism of elderly cranks is not as harmful as perpetuating harmful cultural models at this point in history. I would guess that the film-makers were proud of their celebration of Jaipur, and of showing the Britons overcoming their cultural biases. And, in fact, they did so and probably ought to be so.
Because, hey, it’s a good movie. And while there’s all that problematic stuff, yes, it’s hardly the most racist movie I have ever seen. Or the most racist thing I have seen this year. Or this week, even. Still. Gr.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.