The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - this film was high on my must-see dvd list due to its cast.  No idea what it was actually about, so was stunned with delight as the story(ies) unfolded to reveal a movie about aging & resilience & the invaluable gifts older people can bring to those around them.

Even as the film opened & I realized the characters were all of a certain "young old" age, it didn't dawn on me that something special was unfolding.  It took until Judi Dench's Evelyn Greenslade writes on her blog about adjusting from England to India - "Initially, you're overwhelmed. But gradually you realize it's like a wave. Resist, and you'll be knocked over. Dive into it, and you'll swim out the other side." - to realize how multi-layered this film would be.  

And it reminded me of something that my own mother wrote in a long-ago e-mail to a devoted circle of online friends:
Growing old, even some of the sadder aspects of it,  is part of the Lord's grand scheme.  Let go of time-bound prejudices and fears  of growing older.  Marianne Williamson says that to get to the light, a  person has to work through the darkness.    In middle and early old age, life  can seem dark and scary as we move out of the familiar into the unknown.   Work through it toward the light.

Would love to say it struck me how the characters reflected Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' seven stages of grief, but that didn't click until reading Moses Mo's Innovation and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  YES!  It completely went over my head that each of them - from Judi Dench's most-balanced-of-the-lot Evelyn to Penelope Wilton's bitter Jean Ainslie - illustrate denial, anger, bargaining & sorrow, each finally embracing or at least moving toward acceptance.  I caught on that each had found a "capacity for new life," but had missed what got them there.

One particular sentence in the article resounds through me - "And so, at the heart of the film, is a message about a most important choice in life, whether to expand and grow, or to wither and die."

Again, a rephrasing of Evelyn's blog posting.  And it fascinates to realize that the character who seemed to choose to wither actually opens up new possible horizons for herself & her husband.  


What most lifts me up, what left me stunned with shocked recognition is the article's recognition of the vital role of visionary.  

Dev Patel plays Sonny, the manager of the hotel, whose utter belief in his dream & vision for the hotel has brought this disparate group of Brits to a once magnificent now crumbling building where he envisions out-sourcing housing to the world's aging population.  It is Sonny's "photoshopped visions" that drew this disparate group of fledgling ex-pats to Jaipur, a city in North India.  

Like Sonny, I am a visionary, seeing a culture that embraces the aging & elderly rather than distancing from them, a restoration of the value of heritage & the power of wisdom that's been the gift of aging through the millennia.  

However, Sonny thought he could make his vision a reality all by himself.  Not me!  I recognized how woefully lacking I was in various infrastructures & set out to shore them up.  My radar is always on the look out for strategic consultants who can help this "innovation officer" become an effective agent of considerable constructive change.

Sonny didn't have the financial cojones of his two brothers, he had no skill at presenting the hotel as a viable investment opportunity to a banker, but he had the great, unlearnable talent of drawing around himself others who would help ground him, help fill in the places where his vision would flummox & fall without a strong arm to support & guide him.  

I find the concluding paragraph in Moses Mo's article particularly galvanizing, for myself, for my older friends & grannie clients:
But the catalyzing step is to take action.  This is not a small thing, as it requires finding the courage to “innovate your way out of the predicament” - which, in desperate times, feels a bit like building a parachute on the way down. It’s a far more courageous choice than the knee-jerk reaction of laying off some staff and battening down the hatches.  It is a commitment to boldness that breathes life into a vision of change.

The article relates The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to business innovation.  I fold his article back, relating it Evelyn's charge to dive into the unknown, to swim on until you reach the Other Side.