Golden
years, bah! It is true that most of us
change fundamentally as we age, and rarely for the better. Take me, for instance.
When this
film came out ten years ago I admired it from a number of viewpoints. I liked it a lot. I regarded it as, basically, a comedy. Last night I watched it again; somehow it had
transformed itself into a faintly sorrowful commentary on the aging
process. Of course, I was in a faintly sorrowful
mood myself. The funny bits were still
there, but they were overwhelmed by the sad stuff’
Marigold is an English movie. The River Thames, and maybe all the other
rivers in the U.K., must somehow manage to flow over and dissolve a geologic
stratum that contains some mysterious chemical that transforms ordinary people
into great actresses and actors. There
are a bunch of them on display here, most noteworthy Maggie Smith, Judi Dench,
Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nightly, and Penelope Wilton. Any one of these could carry a movie single handedly;
put them together and you have a cinematic juggernaut. And, yeah, the rest of the cast is plenty
fine, too. It certainly wasn’t the
acting that I deplored last night, nor even the plot. It’s just that Marigold left me – sad. But
watch it anyway. You will enjoy it, on
several levels. B+
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