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Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today.

Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films.

Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com/user/jsjkim, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ReThinkReviews. ReThink Reviews’ theme song is by Restavrant.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

This weekend, movie theaters will be dominated by the megabudget mother of all superhero films, ‘The Avengers’. But if you’re an adult, especially over a certain age, a nearly two and a half hour action movie might not be your thing. So some studios have gone the opposite direction with a strategy generally known as counterprogramming, and few movies seem more counter to ‘The Avengers’ than ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, a dramedy about a group of British senior citizens who travel to India, lured by the dream of spending their golden years at a lavish resort in an exotic country with a favorable exchange rate, only to find that the most important trip for them to take is leaving their comfort zones.

The ensemble cast sounds like the faculty of a top-ranked British acting academy. Judi Dench plays the newly widowed Evelyn, who needs to cut her expenses and get her first job after her husband’s death reveals decades of fiscal irresponsibility. Tom Wilkerson plays Graham, a high court judge who grew up in India and decides to return to resolve unfinished personal business. Maggie Smith is Muriel, a closed-minded, openly racist former housekeeper who only wants to be in India as long as it takes to get a discounted hip surgery. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are Douglas and Jean, a dissatisfied couple who realize that their pensions won’t provide them with the retirement they’d envisioned, and Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie play Norman and Madge, two singles hoping that India will provide one last chance at love.

The group arrives in Jaipur, but instead of the palatial resort seen in the brochures and website, they find the Exotic Marigold Hotel to be a crumbling, dusty mess managed by the overambitious but eager-to-please Sonny, played by ‘Slumdog Millionaire’’s Dev Patel, a young go-getter whose desire to rehabilitate the hotel in accordance with his departed father’s dreams and start a business based on the concept of outsourcing retirement seems beyond his ability to do either.

India has long held a special place in the hearts of the West, first as the source of valuable and exotic exports like spices and silk, and more recently as a place of spiritual purity and renewal for new age yoga tourists. So it seems the greatest risk of a movie like ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ would be the one-dimensional fetishizing of the country, where India is held up as a magical bazaar whose inhabitants, with their spirituality and simple lives, possess profound and timeless wisdom that heals the souls of jaded, lost westerners.

Thankfully, ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ doesn’t do that, and Sonny’s one piece of wisdom — that everything will be all right in the end, so if it’s not all right, it is not yet the end — seems more of an affirmation for himself than his guests. While the film doesn’t do justice to the poverty, pollution, inequality, and unsanitary conditions that make India such a difficult destination for inexperienced and squeamish travelers, it rightly paints India as a place of contrasts undergoing rapid changes.

This is best exemplified through Sonny’s relationship with Sunaina, played by Tena Desae, who works in a call center where Evelyn gets her first job coaching operators on how to better deal with elderly overseas customers. Sunaina is a product of modern India, which doesn’t sit well with Sonny’s conservative mother, played by Lillete Dubey, whose disapproval of Sunaina is more a critique of India’s shifting culture than Sunaina’s personal attributes.

But what’s nice is that Sonny is given as much screentime as his British guests, instead of just being relegated to the kinds of grinning locals and gurus found in the ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ variety of self-discovery travel porn. It’s refreshing to see a smart, witty, often poignant film that addresses the challenge of making a dignified transition into one’s twilight years, where the answer isn’t found in the ancient wisdom of a foreign land, but through our ability to overcome our fears, reconcile our pasts, and start our lives anew, no matter how old we are.

‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ is rated PG-13 and opens today in select theaters.