This is not Forster or Paul Scott territory. There's only a small reference to the imperial legacy, which seems to play little part in the characters' reaction to the place (they could all have been settling in Thailand and it wouldn't have changed the story much), and in tone it owes more to Shirley Valentine than The Jewel in the Crown. It also springs the occasional surprise — one of the lead characters, there to find a long-lost first love, is gay, for example, and another particularly uptight suburban type, far from being opened up by the assault on her senses, has her dislikes confirmed right to the very end — only to see her life change in a different way.
Directed by John Madden, who made the brilliantly clever Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has the sort of cast which gives you that welcome feeling (especially on a wet Saturday night) of knowing you're in safe hands. As a widow who finds that her husband wasn't the reliable sort she'd always thought, Judi Dench is at the centre of it all, like a sort of thespian mother ship. I've been racking my brains since watching this film and still can't come up with a movie in which she gives a bad or indifferent performance. Her assurance in front of the camera seems only to increase. Now well into her seventies, she has become one of the great international screen actors and, for what's it worth, more beautiful with age. We can predict from the start that her character will come out of this well, but that is what we want to happen; it's an unchanging attribute particular to true stars that they take us along a well-known route, with us perfectly happy to go with them.
Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Celia Imrie and Bill Nighy are among the disappointed, unfulfilled and regretful types who populate the Last Chance Saloon around her. They might be stereotypical — Wilkinson is a successful but lonely judge, Imrie a woman of a certain age who sees this trip as her last try at finding love — but they manage not to drift into caricature. And stereotypical or not, there is never any question that we care about what happens to them. Their concerns and fears will have a resonance with anybody over 50 who has ever dreamed of starting over again, or making up for lost time — and that must surely mean most people.
