The thing about movies staffed with actors in their golden years is that the subtext of age invades every aspect of the movie -which almost forces the movie to be about that age in a way that movies cast with youth are not.
I didn't plan to see Hope Springs, but there I was watching an impossibly wrinkled Tommy Lee Jones and a visibly older Meryl Streep going through the motions of marriage counseling with a much effaced Steve Carrell as their therapist. (I didn't plan on seeing Django Unchained either, but more on that in another post). I was hoping that Meryl would keep her hands away from her face - there is this thing she does in almost every movie - a gesture of false modesty that I dearly hoped she would spare us. About three times in the movie, she didn't (spare us). See publicity shot.That's not acting, that's a Meryl thing. Kay and Arnold had been married for thirty years - the last five of which were sexless. Kay is ready to break out or break away, and Arnold is in some sort of denial. In desperation she books them both for a week with a celebrity therapist in the town of Hope Springs, Maine. At the beginning, our sympathies lie with Kay ( her attempts at intimacy are bluntly rebuffed by her husband) until the third or so therapy session when it becomes clear that Arnold is the one who sustained the emotional blow years earlier. We can see the shades go up behind Steve Carrell's eyes as he realizes that all is not as Kay has painted it. The couple awkwardly goes through a series of exercises aimed at restoring intimacy, and they eventually arrive at something , though I don't know what. However at awkwardness, they were good.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an Indian oasis where British golden oldies come to live (almost) free or die. Part medical tourism mecca, part halfway house - these Brits are all strapped for cash and averse to curry. The hotel is run by a young man trying to hold up his candle to his older bothers' lanterns. His mother is barely humoring him, and her threats to close the hotel and ostracize his love interest make up the sub-plot of the movie. Best Exotic showcases a range of responses to aging: awkward attempts at hooking up, eleventh hour gold-digging, siren calls, swan songs, fatalism and reinvention. Judi Dench plays a woman with nothing left in England who finds fulfillment using her knowledge of consumer psychology to help Indian phone bank workers. In this she finds new purpose for her life. Judi Dench is no freer of Judi in her acting than Ms Streep is of Meryl,except that she approaches her roles from the opposite direction. Through her default mode of stoicism ,she lets the emotion break through believably, and we take her in whole. Ms Dench seems to use emotion for traction whereas Ms. Streep tries to use it as an engine. One performance has movement and the other is just so much wheel spinning.
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