Monday at the Movies - December 31, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” the final installment for 2012 (and, I think, also the final numbered installment).  We close the year with another arbitrary theme, movies that start with the word “The.”

The Debt (2011) – The Debt barely got any play when it came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame, because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain most audiences.  Parallel narratives reveal what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen) and how the experience affected them later in life.  The older agents are portrayed by “big names” – Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s internal and external scars.  But it’s Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood.  She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how traumatic her encounter is.  It’s an interesting companion piece to Munich, but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred Hinds).  It’s hard to believe this is the same director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since The Debt is more intense and more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course), smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly leading the audience to several premature conclusions.  In short, The Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of westerns.  The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.  The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman fans).  My father rightly pointed out that the film feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles.  What’s disappointing is that the film feels a bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart).  Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused, likely due to the size of the large supporting cast.  It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t great.  And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Happy New Year, loyal readers! 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)

When I say that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (affectionately dubbed “Old People in India” by yours truly) is the anti-Avengers, I mean that in a good way, honestly.  Everything that The Avengers is, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is not, and vice versa.  None of this is to the film’s detriment, however, because there’s no reason the two films can’t come out the same weekend at the box office – and no reason I can’t enjoy both.

Director John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love, some of whose alums appear here) guides a cast of every elder British thespian (save Peter O’Toole, who was considered and whose absence here is a loss for us all) in a story of retirees who are misled by a garrulous advertisement for a retirement home “for the elderly and beautiful” owned and operated by the young Dev Patel (known to American audiences from Slumdog Millionaire).

Judi Dench is Evelyn, a blogger and young soul making the most of her experience; Tom Wilkinson is Graham, a former judge who grew up in India and has returned to seek out a former flame; Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton (“Harriet Jones, MP”) are the married couple Douglas and Jean, at odds about their future prospects and in conflict over Douglas’s perennial optimism; and Maggie Smith is the scene-stealing Muriel, a crotchety and xenophobic (but, in the classic British tradition, eminently endearing) candidate for a hip replacement.

The stakes are not high here; there’s no world to save or, for the most part, character flaws to overcome (though Wilton and Smith do excellent work rendering their characters as, at best, difficult to love).  There are no superpowers or flamboyant costumes.  Nothing blows up.  So how does The Cinema King, who gave The Avengers such a rave review, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel?

Surprisingly, for the same reason I enjoyed The Avengers – a fun (but still emotionally compelling) story populated by entertaining characters portrayed by actors at the top of their game.  The obvious draw here likely isn’t the fish-out-of-water story (the trailers never touted that it was adapted from a book by Deborah Moggach) nor the exotic scenery.  Instead, the main attraction is the all-star cast of Britain’s most talented, all of whom bring their A-game to the table.  It’d be folly simply to catalog the actors and laud them individually, but their skills bear highlighting. 

Dench is charming and grandmotherly, as always, the kind of woman with whom you’d like to vacation.  Wilkinson handles his plotline with his trademark staid countenance, loosening up once in a while when he realizes retirement isn’t all serious business.  While Smith is more entertaining than one might expect from this movie – I had no idea her character was going to be so racist until her first scene – she might bring a tear to your eye as she begins to bond with one of the “untouchables.”  And Nighy and Wilton have perhaps the hardest job of all, Nighy repressing his natural charm to portray a man browbeaten by Wilton, who’s unwontedly shrewish and tasked with being the only unlikeable character in the piece. 

Even Patel, whose work in Slumdog Millionaire didn’t knock me out the way it did every other major film critic in the world, has fun here, resisting the apparent urge to pigeonhole by performing the stereotypical Indian figure (everything is “most beautiful” or “of the highest honor” and “we have a saying in India”), but when he’s among family and friends, he’s perfectly normal and speaks like everyone else in the film.  It’s a subtle distinction, but one which is much needed in a film which could very easily fall into the “empire coming back” trope.

All told, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a satisfying film with a gifted cast who could redeem even an episode of Jersey Shore by ethos alone.  While it’s one of the quieter movies you’ll see all year, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a perfect counterpoint to the high-octane action of the traditional summer blockbuster.

If nothing else, you’ll be calling your travel agent asking if Judi Dench is free for a weekend in New Delhi.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is rated PG-13 “for sexual content and language.”  The UK's stock character of the libidinous old man accompanies our crew, attempting to meet ladies left and right, jesting all the while about it; additionally, the sexual relationship of the hotel’s owner with his girlfriend becomes the topic of discussion several times.  There’s one F-bomb and a few remarks which I suspect are more scandalous for a British audience than for us Yanks.