Academy Award® nominee John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) steers this star-studded adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel
about a disparate collection of English retirees, each one disappointed in their lives, drawn to a hotel in Jaipur by the promise of living out
their remaining years in the kind of romantic grandeur they can’t afford at home.
There’s timid Evelyn (Judi Dench), still grieving for her late husband; Muriel (Maggie Smith), a housekeeper and inveterate xenophobe; Graham (Tom Wilkinson), a retired high court judge nursing an old, deep wound; bickering couple Douglas (Bill Nighy) and Jean (Penelope Wilton), not to mention Ronald Pickup’s hapless Lothario Norman and Celia Imrie’s free-spirited Madge. Converging on the hotel with their hopes writ all too large on their faces, they find not the paradise they imagined but a picturesque ruin presided over by Sonny (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel), an irrepressible optimist whose talent for self-promotion hides his powerlessness in the face of his formidable mother.
The sharp script is full of knockout lines delivered – as you’d expect from a cast of this calibre – with panache as each traveller gropes their way towards surprising forms of redemption.
