Review of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Directed by John Madden
“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life,” writes Roger Angell, longtime editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, in an essay about life in his nineties, “but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love… I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight.”
This sentiment goes right to heart of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. Director John Madden’s latest offering brings everyone’s favorite elderly expats back for another shot at figuring out how to do this thing called life. It ends in the heartwarming conclusion that new stories always remain to be told, as long as at least some vitality remains in our bones. The strands of half a dozen stories or so woven through each other in the film serve as case studies of this lesson.
The film starts on a comedic note as the inept but good-hearted entrepreneur Sonny (played wonderfully by Dev Patel) and Muriel (Maggie Smith) travel to San Diego to woo investors so that Sonny can purchase a new hotel and expand his burgeoning business empire. The antics that follow are mercifully much funnier than people of that final age demographic tend to be in real life. Gradually the story becomes more sentimental as Sonny’s marriage finally happens, flirting blossoms into open romance, and old love is rekindled. Like that grandma or aunt that gets a little too mushy, however, once we release where all the stories are going, the film it starts to drag because it doesn’t wrap them up succinctly. And so we start to wonder (just as many of the elderly characters wonder about their own lives) “When will it be over?” Aside from that small complaint, this return to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a welcome delight.
In a culture when your 20s are the new 30s, and when the elderly are increasingly relegated to irrelevancy, it’s refreshing to see stories that glory in old age. Indeed, the film embraces the latter years wholeheartedly, celebrating them as a time of fresh opportunity for romance and adventure. Yet it does not shy away from the reality that this season of life is more likely to be cut short than any other. Snide remarks and jokes about death abound, and rightfully so, for it is far better to be up front and make light of it than try and skirt the subject.
This blithe approach to our own morality is particularly instructive for the Christian, who is free to embrace any age at which he happens to find himself in the confidence that a new life in a resurrected body awaits him in the life to come. John Piper’s exhortation comes to mind here: don’t waste your life. When you retire, God will not be impressed by all the shells you gathered; surely you can find a better way to spend your time. The Psalmist said it best: “Teach us to number our days, O Lord, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
Despite its cast (or perhaps because of the perspective they offer), the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel also has lessons for the young, represented in the hyperactive Sonny and his fiancé Sunaina (Tina Desai). First and foremost, rejoice in the wife of your youth. We’ve seen it time and again in the movies, but it bears repeating. The relationship with your spouse must always come first – before your job, before other friendships, before meddling in the affairs of others. As Muriel shares her evaluation of Sonny at the end of the film, she notes he gets a lot of things wrong in the course of managing a hotel and being engaged, but in the end he gets the big questions right. And that is a beautiful thing to behold.
The trick, we see, is not to fear the loss of youth, but embrace each season of life for the season it is, recognizing that it is but a season, full of its own joys and trials. And like the mist that evaporates under the rising sun, it will all be over soon, so make the most of it.
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