Marygold Hotel - 2011

A very nice film, full of emotions, drama, smiles and great actors. It's the story of various English people who decide to go to India to live in the Marygold hotel: Evelyn (Judi Dench) is a widow who's found out that her husband left her with lots of debts, so she has no money, she even had to sold her house, and now finds a job there in India; Douglas (Bill Nighy) and Jean (Penelope Wilton) are an unhappy couple who gave all their money to their daughter to start off her business; Madge (Celia Imrie) is a grandma who doesn't want to spend the rest of her life at home babysitting, she wants to feel alive again and maybe find a new husband; Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) is a bitter woman that was left home alone after a lifetime of service for the same family; Norman (Ronald Pickup) is a lonely man in search of a woman; Graham (Tom Wilkinson) is a judge with a bad health who retires and goes to spend the last days of his life in India where he lived many years before.
You understand from the start, after the characters are introduced, what will the the movie's theme. These are people who feel alone, useless and sort of hopeless and in India they will find a new life, a new purpose, a new reason to smile again. It works for some of them at least. Graham goes looking everywhere for a lost love, finds it, is relieved to see he had a good life after all, and then he dies. Muriel was very intolerant and racist at first, because she felt alone and abandoned and unhappy, but here she finds again  a way to feel useful when she helps Sonny (Dev Patel) save his hotel, where she'll then stay to help him in the practical and financial aspects of the business. Sonny finally finds the courage to tell Sunaina (Tina Desai) that he loves her and stands up to his mother, insisting he wants to marry her. At first the mother strongly opposes this but then an old man living there reminds her of when the same thing happened to her, and she finally accepted Sunaina.
This was a more important scene than it appears at first, because Muriel witnesses the scene, and that old man is like her: they both spent their lives working for the same family, only he was not sent away as unnecessary, useless, as he got old, but he's kept as part of the family, doing what he can and no more.
Douglas here is a new man, he loves the place, the colours, the things to visit, the people, and he enjoys Evelyn's company. On the contrary Jean hates the place, the noise, the dirt, the food, and as soon as their daughter tells them she can give them back the money she wants to run away, go back home to England. He's the kind of man that would never leave her, so it's her to finally admit their marriage is over, and they should split up, so she goes away while he stays here.
I think this is a very delicate, emotional film, and the age of the characters is important because it amplifies everything, gives a new meaning to everything. The scene when Douglas and Evelyn talk and hug would have been totally different with young characters, so easily misunderstood: she says she went to speak with Mugash (or some name similar, sorry) 's wife to see if she knew everything about him and Graham, and learned that yes, she did, he had told her everything before the marriage, there never was any secret between them, and this is great ,but she cries because it wasn't like that between her and her husband, and Douglas hugs her to console her, and you don't think bad of it, you don't believe she's trying to steal anybody's husband and he's not trying to take advantage of a fragile woman. No, you feel how lost she is for realizing she had no idea of what her husband was doing, and he's just glad to be able to connect to someone on an emotional level instead of always arguing or being ordered about. When he doesn't leave , instead he comes back to the hotel and they meet, he only asks when she'll be back from work for a tea together, and inquires how she takes her tea as a kind way of caring. The last image with Muriel at the hotel reception is lovely: she's well again as she had not been in a long time, with something to take her occupied all the time, and really useful in what she does because there would be no Marygold hotel without her :-)