Best Exotic Marigold Hotel both Delights and Offends

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2011)

Directed by John Madden

PG-13, 129 mins. (Participant Media/Fox Searchlight)

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Seven elderly Brits find themselves facing their twilight years under less-than-ideal circumstances. Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) has just lost her husband; Graham Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) is a cynical judge facing forced retirement; Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) is a racist battleaxe who needs a hip replacement she can’t afford; Norman Cousins (Ronald Pickup) is a randy old satyr whose act has grown stale in England; Marge Hardcastle (Celia Imrie) has grown weary of being the live-in babysitter for her grandchildren and would like to find herself a sugar daddy; and Douglas and Jean Ainslie (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) lost their golden nest egg by investing it in their daughter’s Internet startup company. Seven old people–each in need of a major life change before shuffling off this mortal coil. And each in possession of a slick brochure promising a new way to spend one’s declining years in pampered luxury. All one has to get to Jangipur, India, where one can be cared for amidst the splendor of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful.

From this setup we already know three things: that nobody will be quite what they seem, that things will not go as planned, and that some of the characters will be underdeveloped. Regarding the last point, if we toss in hotel owner Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire), his girlfriend Sunaina (Tena Desae), and his domineering mother (Lilete Dubey), that makes ten majors for a film that’s just a shade over two hours. It’s inevitable that several of them will be painted with very broad strokes. It also means that much of what we encounter in the film will be formulaic and predictable. Start with films such as Shirley Valentine, Enchanted April, A Passage to India, The Piano, Heat and Dust, and The Jewell in the Crown and one could assemble a yearlong film festival on the theme of cold-hearted English people who thaw when exposed to warm climes. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel falls firmly into that genre.

Of the principles, only those played by Wilkinson, Dench, Nighy, and Wilton have a lot to do, though Maggie Smith (predictably) gets to “surprise” us toward the end by–you guessed it–being transformed by India. Wilkinson, who is always a marvel, plays his part to hangdog perfection. He’s mystery man Dashwood, the only person who had actually been to India before. When he was a feckless youth he lived in Jangipur and fell into forbidden love with a local man. Although his traveling companions think him the height of respectability and wisdom–and two of the women would like to have a go at him–he’s actually there to track down his Indian lover whose life he presumes he ruined. But it is Greenslade who really settles in. The film’s narrative is often advanced through her blog, though how she goes from not knowing how to use a computer to being an advanced blogger is one of many things left unexplained. Some of the best drama lies in the dynamics of the Ainslies. Wilton–last viewed by most as Isobel Crawley in Downton Abbey–is positively insufferable as the Brit who hates India, Indians, the food, the weather, and pretty much everything else. Nighy is her cool contrast–outwardly ineffectual, silently enthusiastic, and inexorably moving away from his wife and toward Evelyn. The rest of the characters are there for window dressing and comic relief, some of the latter on the cheap side (aches and pains, Viagra jokes, old girl on-the-make, etc.).

As noted, a whole lot of this film plays out exactly as one would have predicted. We give away nothing by telling you that the gap between the brochure and the actual hotel is vast. The banter between characters is frequently witty and sharp, though it is due more to having assembled some of the best actors on the planet than to Ol Parker’s screenplay. In fact, in the hands of lesser actors, this film might have been an embarrassment. It trades in tons of stereotypes about the elderly. Even worse are those involving Indians. (Did the Brits not hear the complaints about Slumdog Millionaire, or do they just not care?) Let’s see: a fast-talking but dishonest hotelkeeper, rooms full of telephone solicitors, cute beggars, five-alarm food, poor-but-happy slum dwellers, rampant corruption….

For all of the criticism, though, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an enjoyable way to spend a few hours. Above all it’s a testament to how great actors can make a slag heap look like a pile of diamonds. And here’s the other thing. We saw a 2 pm matinee in a large theater that was two-thirds full. All subsequent shows were sold out and it’s been packing them in for almost two weeks now. Most of the people in line were over 50. Think there’s an age demographic that’s been underserved and is hungry to see films that aren’t filled with guns, f/x, and pretty-but-vacuous actors? Yep!  

Liberals Should Stop Feeling Sorry for Idiots

Today's Working Class: Mr. Block Triumphant! 

File this one in the drawer marked “Has anyone paying attention for the past 40 years?” Gary Younge’s recent piece for the Guardian reveals that poor white Americans prefer Mitt Romney to Barack Obama by a 58% to 32% margin. The Guardian is a British paper, but its coverage of American politics is generally more astute than anything found in the United States, and that includes the good, gray (and vastly overrated) New York Times. This time, though, the Guardian sinks to simplistic analysis worthy of Fox News.

Okay, I exaggerate. Unlike Fox, Younge got quite a few things right. He’s spot on when noting that this isn’t new; Bush won the blue-collar and poor vote by roughly the same margin. So did John McCain. Younge doesn’t push it back much further, though he could. The working-class poor began to abandon the Democrats en masse in the 1960s and for many of the same reasons as today–they were seduced into thinking that social and cultural concerns were more important than power relations. In truth, though, their presence in the New Deal Coalition was  tenuous from the get-go. They could be found in big numbers among the Dixiecrats resisting civil rights after World War II and in the George Wallace campaign of 1968. Millions more voted for Nixon that year, and for Reagan in 1980 and 1984. They were perfect fodder for the come-to-Jesus snake oil salesmen of the age of cable.

Younge suggests that liberals don’t understand the poor or blue-collar workers very well. I agree, but the problem is the opposite of the contempt and condescension he notes. At this point I should reveal that I grew up working-class poor and am now a labor historian. I have been equally guilty of the liberals’ primary sin toward the lower classes: romanticism. That is to say, liberals and academics have been among the worst offenders of allowing the working class to avoid taking responsibility for self-created conditions. By casting the working class as deceived rather than deluded, as seduced rather than a willing bed partners, as victims rather than participants, lots of well-meaning folks have become enablers when they should have been critics.

Younge notes (correctly) that the Democrats don’t exactly offer an irresistible economic plan for the poor, but he and I part company when he says that viewing social class in economic terms alone is condescending. What Karl Marx observed 140 years ago is just as true today–class-consciousness is a prerequisite for class formation. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the working class anymore. Younge would have us excuse the myopia that leads workers to focus on social issues while ignoring their objective economic reality. He’d also label liberal misunderstanding a greater sin than the blockhead mentality that thinks saving the country from gay marriages, prayerless schools, or taxes, or abortion, or teachers’ unions, or [fill in a paranoid single cause here] is more important than the very objective, material realities that undergird social class. Too much of today’s working class is, as the Industrial Workers of the World labeled it in the early 20^th century, the embodiment of Mr. Block–the industrial slave who thinks highly of his boss/master. (How’s that GOP trickle-down thing working out for y’all?)

I’ll play apostate. It’s time for liberals to call out such nonsense and hold those who can think accountable for their behavior. I’m all for helping those who can’t help themselves. I’m not so naïve as to think that anyone who wants a job in a nation with near-double-digit unemployment can get one. That said, a boorish lout is a boorish lout, whether he has an MBA from Harvard or carries a racist banner in a Tea Party rally in a played-out West Virginia coal town. Today’s working class is not the same one that led sit-down strikes in the 1930s; far too often it consists of Mr. Blocks willing to fan the flames of misogyny, homophobia, racism, anti-government paranoia, and slogan-slinging libertarianism. Younge decries the liberal critique that the lower classes are modern-day Know Nothings. Well, dammit, they are! Myopia is a single step removed from blindness. It’s even worse; it’s a self-induced loss of sight.

Here’s another reality. The blue-collar white working class is a dying anachronism. Walter Reuther and the sit-down strikers aren’t coming back. (Today’s autoworkers are as likely to be found among global warming deniers as on a picket line.) It’s time for liberals to step out of the red state/blue state dialogue and go purple. That is, stop making excuses for idiots and, by all means, stop wasting resources trying to organize those who don’t wish to be organized. It’s time for a new progressive coalition fashioned from 21^st century reality, not mid-20^th century dreams. What might it look like? One only has to look at demographics and, yes, economics. A liberal-led purple coalition would be female and ethnic, not male and Anglo. It would also galvanize lower-level professionals, service-industry workers, the involuntarily disadvantaged, and contingency workers; that is, those whose paychecks and material conditions lead to class-consciousness. Get these folks organized and maybe Mr. Block will put on a pair of glasses and take a hard look around. 

Article 5, a Flawed Pastiche

Article 5 (2012)

Kristen Simmons

Tor Books ISBN # 978-0765329588

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Article 5 is the latest entry into the dystopia market for teen and young adult readers. It’s the debut novel from Kristen Simmons, a social worker-turned-writer, and it bears many of the earmarks of a first book, particularly a not-so-original story and less-than-sparkling prose. It is, in essence, a mash-up for teens of several much better books: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Just for good measure, the book’s central relationship is vaguely reminiscent of The Hunger Games.

The book won’t win any originality awards, but it’s a decent pastiche. Its setting is a not-so-distant future in which the United States has been devastated by an unexplained war. Many of the cities have been abandoned, those that remain have degenerated into self-contained neighborhoods beyond which one does not wish to stray (á la Parable of the Sower), and the Bill of Rights has been scrapped in favor of something called the Moral Statutes. The new governing authority is one part theocratic and one part military junta–think a Christian version of the Taliban.

We meet Lori Whittman, a freewheeling/free loving single mom living in what used to be Memphis, presumably in one of those suburbs populated by holier-than-thou evangelicals. In post-apocalyptic America, those Christian patients now run the asylum–literally. Women are now fair game and Lori is about to be arrested by the Federal Bureau of Reformation–whose officers are nicknamed the Moral Militia, MM for short–and sent away to a reeducation center for her ex post facto sins. Moreover, Lori’s transgression of Article 5 morals codes also taints her daughter, 17-year-old Ember Miller, who will be sent to a reform school until she is 18. She will be expected to cleanse her spirit, abandon her will, wear modest clothing, defer to men, and conform to the patriarchy that governs the United States. (That’s the Handmaiden’s Tale part.) To make matters worse, the arrest force includes Chase Jennings, a young man on whom Ember once had a serious crush, but is now a dead-eyed MM foot soldier.

As in all such books, Ember is too strong-willed to adapt to the Dickensian reform school to which she’s sent, or to put up with its sadistic head mistress. She is fixated upon escaping and rescuing her mother, though readers are as clueless as Ember on how she’s going to do this. Chase aids her flight, but can she trust him? (Think the dynamics of Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games.) The two set off across burnt over and burnt out parts of country, where they will have to fend off desperate postwar survivors who would be happy to rob and kill them. They are making their way toward South Carolina, allegedly a refuge beyond the control of the MM. And, of course, they meet with Resistance fighters. (The Road, anybody?)

We’ve seen all this before in much better literary form and with far greater dramatic development. Simmons’ novel has logic holes through which one could drive several commandeered vehicles. For all its obvious flaws, though, the book is a breezy read–a classic guilty pleasure. Grade it a B for pastiche, a C for drama, and a D for originality. It’s also pretty much a PG-13 book devoid of sex or graphic descriptions of violence. Assuming you’re a non-evangelical parent, the book could be used to discuss with teens important issues such as the role of women in society, who defines morality, and who watches the moral watchers. Adult readers will probably find it little more than light airplane reading that sends them back to Margaret Atwood. Who can begrudge a book that renews interest in that fine North American woman of letters? --Rob Weir

PS– ­While I’m handing out grades, how about an F for our current state of society? As an educator, I’m alarmed by how few young people have the slightest belief in the possibility of utopia, but can easily conjure a Hunger Games/Article 5 nightmare future. What does it say about our society when vampires, zombies, and a Mad Max future populate the teen reading world?

Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem Break Down Boundaries

RANI ARBO & daisy mayhem

Some Bright Morning

Signature Sounds 2076

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Some Bright Morning was recorded in Massachusetts, but Ray Bonneville’s guitar contribution for “Travelin’ Shoes” was sent from Texas–an apt device for a project that obliterates lots of boundaries. Categorizing daisy mayhem’s music is a challenge. Arbo has a penchant for gospel music with a secular tinge, which one will hear to beautiful effect on “Crossing the Bar,” her musical scoring of the famed Tennyson poem. But then there’s Anand Nayak’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe,” which is what The Boss might have done it if he was feeling a little bit country. Nayak confounds again On “Johnny Brown” with his down-and-dirty electric guitar that’s somewhere between Chicago-style and Delta blues. And, of course, the band follow with a tune called “Fall River” that sounds as if it was penned to honor the hamlet in southern Tennessee, not the city in southern Massachusetts. That’s also closer to the neck of the woods Andrew Kinsey explores on “Fire in the Sky,” with a vocal that sounds like he’s channeling Ralph Stanley. But when the band gets to an honest-to-goodness Appalachian chestnut like “East Virginia”–a variant of a Child Ballad no less–we get a slowed-down and soulful treatment with sensitive fiddle and guitar solos, not the expected bluegrass breakdown. And let’s give a nod to the singer songwriter tradition while we’re at it. Arbo has two (completely) original compositions on this album, “Bridges” and the “Miami Moon.” The first is Arbo’s musing on the parallel destruction done by Hurricane Irene and the dissolution of a friend’s marriage; the second a swingy song to honor a departed neighbor who loved to dance. Try to get the chorus of “Miami Moon” out of your head. Give up? Complete surrender–that’s my suggested response to everything on this fine album.

Watch and listen to the kick-butt opening track "Here Jerusalem Moan."  

Séan McGann: Beyond Great Big Sea

SÉAN McCANN

Son of a Sailor

Lean Ground Music 2-000063

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Originally published in SingOut! Magazine 54:4

Longtime Great Big Sea (GBS) mainstay Séan McCann also indulges his singer/songwriter persona. Son of a Sailor is his second solo release and the material and feel of it suggest he’s evolving a new genre: Salt Water & Western. The album consists of ten songs that explore blue-collar life, plebian dreams, and everyday heartaches. To set the mood, McCann varies his vocal styles. Sometimes he’s a smooth tenor, sometimes a winsome (and ironic) Irishman, and at other moments he’s earnest, raspy-voiced, and contemplative. Above all, he’s a storyteller. “The Reply (the ballad of John and Mary)” is an across-time love song based loosely on his grandparents that’s like a conversation between two hearts beating in unison. “Soldier’s Song” is an interior look into men deployed away from home that reminds us that they generally think about family, not manufactured warrior ideals. McCann also sings of the lure of the sea (“Rather be a Sailor”), but he balances the ideal with the real. In “Another Long Goodbye” he cleverly uses the romantic ambience of the tune to strip away overly romantic notions of what hard work and seafaring entail. Those who know McCann only from GBS will find his solo efforts less rowdy, more personal, and more folksy than pop. You have to make your way to “Back to You,” the final track, before you get anything that approaches GBS in energy. That’s not a dig; McCann’s quiet, reflective side is sublime.

-Rob Weir    

What if the Rapture came and All the Wrong People Left?

LEFTOVERS (2011)

Tom Perrotta

St. Martin’s 978-031235034

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What if the Rapture occurred, but it was nothing at all like the End-of-Times evangelical Christians—called dispensationalists, if you care—said it would be? What if millions of people suddenly disappeared but there was no discernible rhyme, reason, or pattern? What if way more children, reprobates, animists, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, non-devout Christians, and everyday sinners disappeared than Born-Again fundamentalists? How would the world react? This is the intriguing question novelist Tom Perrotta poses in Leftovers, a book clearly aimed at the smug certainty of Tim LaHaye and Apocalypse-worshipping devotees of his Left Behind novels. (Perrotta also had the good fortune to have this book hit the shelves when Christian radio loose cannon Howard Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011.)

Much like cartoonist Matt Groening (The Simpsons), Perrotta chooses a white-bread suburbia to play out the drama of the post-disappearance world. His Springfield is called Mapleton, a place that feels like one of those fixated on 50s-style family values ‘burbs in the Bible Belt (think Greater Atlanta). As one might expect, what was dubbed the Sudden Departure caused range of responses in Mapleton. The Rev. Matt Jamison is among those men of the cloth who insisted that the event was not The Rapture. His unique proof of that assertion is to become a one-man smut-and-truth exposé squad who reveals the affairs, substance abuse, and general unworthiness of those who vanished, which he duly broadcasts to Mapletonians. Learning that her husband was a philanderer is not helpful to Nora, an attractive young woman who lost her spouse and two children to the Sudden Departure and is so depressed that she spends her days watching the Spongebob Squarepants reruns she once shared with her offspring. Even those families left intact are confused. Perrotta focuses on the Garveys. Paterfamilias Kevin has just been elected mayor of his shocked town, while his wife, Laurie, becomes unglued and joins the Guilty Remnants, one of the many cults that emerged. The Garveys’ son, Tom, is also in a cult—one run by Holy Wayne, a former UPS driver with a harem of young Asian women. Too young …  as it turns out. When Wayne is carted off to jail for pedophilia, Tom loses most of his faith, though he accepts the task of ushering one of Wayne’s wives to a safe house as she is alleged to be bearing a son who will be the new messiah. Daughter Jill chooses a live-for-today route; she befriends bad girl Aimee, who moves in with the Garveys about the time Laurie moves out, and assists Jill’s transformation from honor student to angry low-life.

The book is provocative and, as one might expect, has been widely denounced by those who believe in The Rapture. The Guilty Remnants are especially controversial, as their level of fanaticism suggests all manner of unsavory things about those who live beyond reason. The GR—as they refer to themselves—dress in white, take vows of silence, and make it their mission to become worthy of being raptured by shaming the rest of Mapleton. Their presence is generally heralded by their smell; they chain-smoke, a thoroughly modern mortification of the flesh that’s easier to accommodate as cigarettes are more attainable than hair shirts.  Many of their mannerisms reminded me of the Ellen Jamesians in John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

Perrotta also dares to ask what would happen if years passed with no more disappearances and no explanation for the ones that did occur. Is it possible to move on? Can, for example, Kevin and Nora ease their individual sorrows in each other’s company? This is the sort of question Kevin Brockmeier raised in a different context in his own The Illumination, though he handled it better than Perrotta. I reveal nothing by telling you that many readers will be unsatisfied by how Perrotta’s novel ends. Don’t let that deter you; Leftovers is the kind of book that sparks spirited and needed debates over the presumptions of faith, public morality, private guilt, and collective healing. Sometimes the book’s ideas outclass its style and plot, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  --Rob Weir

Ewan McLennan a true Emerging Artist

EWAN McLENNAN

Rags & Robes

Fellside 235

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This review originally ran in SingOut! Magazine issue 54:4

“Emerging artist” is an overused phrase, but I’m happy to make an exception for the stunning debut release of Ewan McLennan. With songs such as “Arthur McBride,” “A Man’s a Man,” and “I’m a Rover,” the Edinburgh-raised McLennan covers familiar ground, but he does so with a gentleness and a freshness of voice that makes the old new. It’s a quiet album reminiscent of Andy M. Stewart’s post-Silly Wizard solo work in mood. And, like Stewart, McLennan’s tenor voice is unique. It has the timbre of a contemporary such as Paul McKenna, but with more vibrato and with a hint of a rasp. If that sounds gritty, the effect is quite the opposite; McLennan keeps all the ornaments under control and croons with a soothing smoothness. Thus he transforms the feel of a rough roustabout song such as “Tramps and Hawkers” into something that sounds like carefree lads at sport. Equally affecting his velvet-gloved version of “Jack Stewart,” which emerges as less of a drinking song than fellowship with an elderly friend. Each of the fourteen tracks pleases, and each leaves you wanting to hear what McLennan will do next. 

Rob Weir