Last night my teenage daughter and I found
ourselves in a movie theater where we were a minority. We were there to see The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel, a delightful movie about a group of British
retirees who decide to outsource their retirement to India. This time we were
not an ethnic minority (and may I take this opportunity to digress and say that
according to the census minorities are now the majority in the US*) but an age
minority. For almost everyone in the theater was over fifty-five, a fact that
did not go unnoticed by my over-analytical brain as it immediately went to work
on the matter.
I found the age homogeneity of the moviegoers
to be a problem for several reasons. First of all, in my own egotistical ways,
I like to be surrounded by as diverse a group of people as possible: I think it
is the way we learn best, teach best and enjoy life best. I find it boring to
only interact with those likely to think like me, live like me, and do things
the ways I do, so I would have liked to see a population as diverse as possible
watching this little gem. Of course we were there to see a movie and not chitchat,
but there is something to be said about what makes people laugh at the theater,
the comments we whisper to one another, what we disapprove, and all of these
moments are learning experiences. Part
of the reason we go to the movies is the collective nature of the event, and
“the collective” in this event was telling.
Second of all, I hate to think of this
beautiful movie as simply an attempt to cater to a population that is
underserved by the media (which is true but too crude a reason for my
sensibilities). I think both the population in question and the marvelous
actors of this movie (July Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson,
among others) deserve better than that.
But most of all, I find it disturbing that
many people would only care to see stories of people who are “like” them, and
live like they do, at the time of life they are. As a person who thoroughly
enjoys The Diary of a Wimpy Kid and
who thinks Maggie Smith is the best actress in the world, I want to live
vicariously through people who are not me. I also find ageism a particularly wicked form of exclusion,
one borne out of a silly attempt at staticism**.
Many with more gifted minds than mine have
pointed out how prevalent ageism is in some societies, including American
society. Research has also shown that both self-perceptions and social
perceptions of aging extend (when positive) and shorten (when negative) life
span. In societies where aging is closely associated with wisdom, people live
longer, more fulfilling lives. Where the opposite is true, well, you get the
idea.
Ageism is not about a particular age although
one can probably infer that it gets more marked as one’s age advances, but I
know I have experienced it since my mid-thirties, and now, at forty, I have
heard many, many disparaging comments about my age. I honestly don’t know why
we aren’t able to turn things around. As people age, chances are they have more
resources, financial and otherwise, and experience should account for
something. But going back to the
movie, which I seem to have abandoned several paragraphs ago due to my outrage,
it is precisely the issues of ageism and what happens when things don’t turn
out quite the way they “should” that is at stake here.
The Best Exotic… is also a movie about
new beginnings for a judge who goes back to India to solve a 40-year old issue,
a retired housekeeper who outsources her hip replacement to the country, a
widow left with debt, a loveless couple who lent their retirement money to a
failed .com venture by their daughter, a divorcee who was used to (now-declining)
opposite-sex attention, and a man who just feels plain lonely. In the heart of
this supposedly light comedy lie many of the issues inherent not only to their
age group but to other brackets as well: love, healthcare, sex-orientation,
prejudice, costs of living, employment, friendship. Each character of course
will find in the overstimulation provided by their new environment reason to
make decisions about that which afflicts them.
If you are a fan of movies such as Calendar Girls, Saving Grace, Love Actually,
I Capture de Castle, and anything
with Hugh Grant in it, chances are you will like this movie. But critics have
been lukewarm to say the least (Ebert has been kind), and it seems that some
are reluctant to admit that they laughed aloud with the rest of us, that they
sometimes wished they were staying at the Marigold Hotel. That’s when they
start making up stuff.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, writing for EW.com, says
that,
The cinematography shows off the overwhelming sensory stimulation of the
place while stepping briskly around less-than-colorful images of real poverty,
squalor, overcrowding, and despair.
Critics and thinkers in the so-called developed
world seem to often assume that people in the (equally inaptly-named) developing
world are perpetually “in despair.” It makes me think of the saying going viral
on the internet, “Every sixty seconds in Africa… a minute passes,” reminding us
that people are still having fun, loving, enjoying the company of their
children even in the midst of great challenges (we do know some challenges are
immense). And it also makes me wonder if Ms. Schwarzbaum
watched the same movie I did since the images that stayed with me are those of
children paying happily on the streets; a maid sharing a meal with an initially
stuck up, grumpy woman; a young couple in love defying cast rules to stay
together. I don’t remember one single scene that could possibly signal despair.
I think sometimes people are rather overwhelmed by
the fact that when you remove layers of chintz, lead-free paint and scented oil
plug-ins, we are all essentially the same. And more shocking still, they are
amazed by the fact we can be happy and re-find our humanity without big screen
TVs and surround sound (even if modern movie theaters are the epitome of those).
I was once stunned and offended by an ad I saw on a bus when I had just arrived
in the US. It was for one of the international aid groups, and it went
something like “That family only had one egg, and they gave it to me.” I found it patronizing and wrong,
because it tried to focus on the local family rather than show that the
newcomer had been surprised to find his/her own humanity when and where they
least expected.
I am ready to watch The Best Exotic again and again. I read someone refer to it as a
big, warm hug. Others refer to it as a “safe” movie, and I am cool with safe.
But the one question that has been bugging me since I watched the movie and
read some of the reviews is “why do people react so badly to feeling so good?”
*Wrongly, some have
pointed out that it is the first time in history when this has happened,
embarrassingly forgetting that once there were no white Europeans in the
continent…
** The dictionary
says it does not exist, but I am fine with neologisms.
