The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015) centers most of the dramatic tension on the hotel’s manager, Sonny Kapoor. In the first film, the tension is more evened out among the hotel customers and Sonny’s bid to make the run-down hotel a viable operation. The hurdles faced by the retirees in the first film are more gritty, or realistic, than are the challenges in the sequel. Indeed, the second film can come across to the viewer as excessively glitzy, especially at the end when the customers, Sonny, and his family and friends are on a dance floor positioned as if performing for an audience sitting out in front. It is unlikely, for instance, that Sonny could dance so well, particularly as he delayed practice to the disappointment of his fiancé, Sunaina. That film becomes a performance, and this can stretch a viewer’s suspension of disbelief because the screenwriter of both films, Ol Parker, stretches the characters too far beyond themselves. That they, along with Sunny and his wife and their families and friends go into a performance mode can remind the viewer that he or she is watching a performance—that the movie itself is a performance. So much for the suspension of disbelief, a psychological wonder that allows the human mind to forget that it is watching a movie and thus be able to “enter” the story-world.

The problems faced by the hotel customers in the first film included locating a lover of long ago without any remaining prospects of a life together (Graham Dashwood), getting a job (Evelyn Greenslade), being in a bad marriage (Douglas and Jean Ainslie), getting a hip replacement (Muriel Donnelly), and staving off boredom (Norman Cousins). Sonny Kapoor struggles with making the rundown hotel work. These “ordinary life” problems contrast with most (but not all) of the problems that the characters face in the sequel.

The second film centers on Sonny’s quest to engage an American corporate partner to put up funds to buy a second hotel (even as Sonny’s real engagement with Sunaina suffers). In fact, the film begins with Sonny, accompanied by Muriel Donnelly, in southern California to visit a prospective partner in a sleek corporate office. It is as if Sonny had made the first hotel into a smooth-functioning operation. Guy Chambers, a hotel inspector played by Richard Gere, squashes any such illusion fancied by Sonny. In fact, adding Gere, who often played smooth romantic leads, makes the film too star-studded, or glitzy rather than realistic. Gere looks utterly out of place at the hotel; that Sonny treats him like royalty does not help matters. At any rate, Sonny secures Guy’s support not just for another rundown hotel, but, rather, for the highbrow Viceroy’s Club. The purchase is completed incredibly fast, such that it is done in time for Sonny’s and Sunaina’s wedding reception—nevermind that the engagement had been rocky, especially as Sonny turned his attention to pleasing Guy so to gain his financial recommendation so the corporation would agree to become partners. Also at the glittery (and staged) reception, Evelyn’s hesitancy in dating Douglas evaporates as he delivers a (staged) speech. The problem with Douglas’ divorce is apparently solved. Norman Cousins and Carol Parr talk about Carol’s having cheated on Norman, so they are fine. Any hint of ordinary is gone as the customers (except for Muriel, whose sadness in facing death is the outlier) join pretty-boy Guy and the united families (and friends) of Sonny and Sunaina are suddenly performing a dance number positioned as if they were on a theater stage.

Because the dramatic tension in the first film is based on hardship, the tensions in the second film involving the same characters may not feel real in the sense of being contained within suspended disbelief. Graham Dashwood’s arduous attempts to get information from local government bureaucrats and the man struggling with his ailing heart as he plays cricket with some local boys are far indeed from the Sonny’s over-the-top efforts to please Guy Chambers. Given Sonny’s immaturity, it is astonishing that he is right that Guy is a hotel inspector (though Sonny does not realize that the ill-treated hotel customer, Jodi, is also a hotel inspector).

In short, the sequel loses touch with its basis, the characters and their worlds in the first movie. This is particularly odd because Ol Parker wrote both screenplays! I submit that the sequel may even be a different genre than the first. The sequel ends as if it were Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), another sequel about a small hotel. With singing in nearly every scene, the performances are not an over-stretch. The movie is not meant to be realistic. 

Fortunately, Mamma Mia! (2008), the film that that sequel follows, has the same format, so that the sequel is not realistic is not a problem. In fact, this demonstrates that the screenwriter of the sequel, who happens to be Ol Parker (the same screenwriter of the Marigold Hotel movies), was capable of carrying forward a story without stretching it too far. In fact, Parker did not write Mamma Mia! So his faithfulness to that movie in writing the sequel is all the more impressive, and this leaves the question of his lack of fidelity in writing The Second Best Exotic Hotel even more perplexing because he knew how to extend a story without stretching it too far.

By the way, both sequels have what may be Parker’s signature point: pure happiness without some sadness is not possible in life, so a film that is too saccharine can buck the suspension of disbelief. In Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, some sadness is present because Donna has died and she is missed. The film even includes Donna’s ghost, as if to drive home the point that even the happiness of a wedding contains some sadness. In The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Muriel Donnally knows she will die soon; this can be inferred from her reaction coming out of the examination room at a clinic. Maggie Smith marvelously underplays Donnally’s reaction, which actually adds to its significance. In acting, sometimes less is more. Donnally returns to her room during the wedding reception, presumably for medical reasons and also to write Sonny a letter because she is leaving early the next morning to return home to Britain presumably because she knows she is dying. Again, Parker inserts sadness in a wedding scenario. I contend that this is no accident; he is making a statement. Unfortunately, the performance mode at the wedding reception can undercut the suspension of disbelief concerning Donnally’s dramatic plight. If the other hotel customers are really performers, then so too is Maggie Smith.

In conclusion, screenwriting a sequel best includes both a lot of study of the original firm and the willingness be constrained so as to retain a mooring. Of course, a screenwriter and director may prefer to have a free hand in putting together a sequel, but the cost may be glitches in the suspension of disbelief, by which a viewer becomes engrossed in a story-world rather than being conscious of watching a movie. 

Virtual Reality: Not Coming to a Theatre Near You

Virtual reality may be coming your way, and when it hits, it could hit big—as if all at once. The explosion of computers and cell phones provides two precedents. “Technologists say virtual reality could be the next computing platform, revolutionizing the way we play games, work and even socialize.”[1] Anticipating virtual reality as the next computing platform does not do the technology justice. I submit that it could revolutionize “motion pictures.” Even though the impact on screenwriting and filmmaking would be significant, I have in mind here the experience of the viewer.

Whereas augmented reality puts “digital objects on images of the real world,” virtual reality “cuts out the real world entirely.”[2] As a medium for viewing “films”—film itself already being nearly antiquated by 2017—virtual reality could thus cut out everything but a film’s story-world. The suspension of disbelief could be strengthened accordingly. The resulting immersion could dwarf that which is possible in a movie theatre. Already as applied to playing video games, “such full immersion can be so intense that users experience motion sickness or fear of falling.”[3] Imagine being virtually in a room in which a man is raping a woman, or a tiger is ready to pounce—or eating its prey, which happens to be a human whom you’ve virtually watched grow up. The possible physiological impacts on a viewer immersed in stressful content would present producers with ethical questions concerning how far it is reasonable to go—with the matter of legal liability not far behind, or in front. Watching, or better, participating in a film such as Jurassic Park could risk a heart attack.

On the bright side, the craft of light and storytelling made virtual could enable such amazing experiences that simply cannot be experienced without virtual reality being applied to film. To be immersed on Pandora in a nighttime scene of Avatar, for example, would relegate even the experience of 3-D in a theatre. The mind would not need to block out perspectivally all but the large rectangle at a distance in front. In short, the experience of watching a film would be transformed such that what we know as going to a movie would appear prehistoric—like travelling by horse to someone who drives a sports car.

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1. Cat Zakrzewski, “Virtual Reality Comes With a Hitch: Real Reality,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2017.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

The Sound of Music: Marital Roles and Inner Transformations

Fifty years after the film’s initial release in 1965, viewers of The Sound of Music could measure the imprint of the women’s movement of the 1970s by how very different—antiquated actually—the film is in terms of marital roles. Whether Liesl in the first half of the film or Maria in the second, their acceptance of the dominance of husbands over wives stood out like a blade of grass needing to be cut in 2015 for all but a minority of viewers. Yet the internal changes that Maria and the Captain have the courage to undergo resonate in any age, being so much a part of human nature, as distinct from sociological artifacts.

Through roughly the first half of the film, Maria is an individualist bristling first against the conventionality of the convent and then the Captain’s authoritarianism. She refuses, for example, to come to his whistle on principle. In fact, the rebel asks him what signal she could whistle to call him. Meanwhile, Liesl, the captain’s oldest at 16 going on 17, sings of wanting to be needing “someone older and wiser telling [her] what to do.” She will depend on Rolf, she adds. “I’ll take care of you,” he sings in return. In 1965, this exchange would not have sounded odd in the least to most American and European audiences—yet how odd to the ears listening fifty years later. That a cultural understanding can seem like common sense in one era and yet so contrived just fifty years later ought to convince us that what we take for granted as given may be anything but.

Even within the film’s story, Maria changes remarkably from rebel to passive wife. She leaves all decisions to the Captain, including whether and when they would leave Austria. She even refuses Max Detweiler’s request that she try to move the Captain off his opposition to his children singing in public. “I can’t ask the Captain to be less than he is,” she tells Max. The internal shift is remarkable. Like that of the Captain, it happens in an instant.

When the Captain professes his love for Maria, she quickly realizes in song that in her miserable childhood, “I must have done something right.” That added self-confidence may enable her to stop fighting her negative self-image that took form in her miserable childhood. How do you solve a problem like Maria? She does, by feeling worthy of being loved. She does not have enough self-confidence to feel this herself, in spite of her singing, “I have confidence in confidence itself” on her way initially to the family’s formidable mansion. Someone must love her as she is, when her self-confidence is insufficient to kick off her negative self-image and the related rebelliousness. She gets the needed boost when the Captain tells her that he has loved her since her first day with the family—when she sat on the pinecone at dinner. In fact, the inner transformation is instantaneous. From then on, she is radically different—fully in line with the era’s values and customs and not at all independent.

Similarly, when the Captain first hears his children singing, his harsh, formal demeanor melts away instantly and he is a changed person too. He has forgotten what music was like in his house before his wife died—and it is the sound of music that instantly melts away his mourning. Only once he has undergone that inner change can he feel the love he has for Maria, which in turn triggers her realization that she had not been such a bad kid after all. In achieving an inner freedom from her self-hatred, which was fueling her rebelliousness, she willingly subjects herself to her husband’s will and command. Having dropped his command at home, he in turn leads the Von Trapp family out of love rather than from autocratic rule.

During the filming, Christopher Plummer, who played the Captain, said the story is too saccharine; he even referred to the movie’s title derisively as the sound of mucous. On the one hand, that the film is a musical means it is not cinema verité; no one should expect a musical to mirror real-life because people don’t pause several times a day to sing a song. On the other hand, Plummer had a point in that the inner transformations of both his character and Maria occur instantly and without any effort. Besides being utterly unrealistic, glossing over the process of the change compromises the character-development aspect of the film. In other words, the two main characters are rendered too plastic, and thus not readily believable.[1]

Viewing the film in 2015 rather than 1965, the film would doubtless feel even more unrealistic, given the antiquated stances of Rolf and Liesl on marital roles and Maria’s wholesale deference to the Captain as his wife. Standing between these characters and the viewer in 2015 is the women’s movement that transformed the role of women in society as well as in marriages seemingly overnight in the 1970s. Of course, this transition was hardly instantaneous, and neither was it without struggle on the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Interestingly, the sense of fakeness in the antiquated views and conduct would only compound the apprehension of fakeness in the inner transformations of the Captain and Maria. One day, the film may even be viewed as a fairy-tale—as a piece of art rather than a film based on a true story. 

Nevertheless, internal change freeing a person from grief or a negative self-image is of timeless value because such change is a feature of human nature itself, and therefore the story is apt to be engaging in any era. Hence the film can be said to have a timeless aura befitting such a classic of cinema.

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[1] By means of comparison, Pray for Bobby (2009), a film about a gay teenager in an evangelical Christian family, highlights the mother’s arduous inner-struggle as she questions and then changes her religious view on homosexuality. Her entire demeanor changes in the process. The change is hardly instantaneous, unlike those of the Captain and Maria in The Sound of Music. 

Dallas Buyers Club

The maturation of a story’s protagonist—as “growth” eventuated through the progression of the narrative—provides a source of dynamism that can keep a film from being static, or falling flat for lack of character development. At the same time, a good screenwriter is careful not to overdo it, lest a character’s internal transition occur too quickly in terms of the story to be believable. In Dallas Buyers Club, Ron Woodroof—played by Matthew McConaughey—“turns on a dime” in his attitude toward gays. The flip is hardly believable. The question is why.

When a physician informs Ron that he has AIDS—beyond being HIV positive—the rodeo enthusiast and electrician by trade reacts vehemently against the implication that he had contracted the disease from sex with another man. Even from that point, he refers to a gay man as Tinkerbell. The implication is that Ron is severely prejudiced against homosexuality, and his context being that of rodeos in Texas makes this interior state very believable.

Yet without giving the viewer a sense of sufficient story time having elapsed, Ron latterly chokes Tucker, one of his rodeo friends in a grocery store for refusing to shake hands with Ron’s business partner, the cross-dressing, AIDs infected Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Even for Ron to have lost his strong prejudice is hard to fathom, as he could have worked with, and even come to like Rayon without losing his distaste for homosexuality; for Ron to violently force Tucker to shake Rayon’s hand is apt to strike the viewer as sheer artifice on the part of the screenwriter and director. It is as though Ron were a Janus-like fictive caricature rather than a character based on an actual person.

Taken to an extreme, a character’s quick “about face” can leave the viewer wondering where the antagonist went. Indeed, the distinction between a protagonist and an antagonist can become confused, infecting even the structural integrity of the narrative itself. In the 2014 film Godzilla, Godzilla loses all his monster lore built up through preceding films to become—all of a sudden—the savoir of San Francisco. What had been a fight between Godzilla and two other dinosaurs is all of a sudden Godzilla protecting the city and its human inhabitants from the radiation-eating male and female animals invented in this film-version. The switch from antagonist to protagonist simply is not believable, and the story itself suffers as a consequence.

Fortunately, remedies exist. Using story-time rather than short-circuiting can be part of the mix. Lincoln says in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, “time is a great thickener of things.” A montage can give the viewer a sense not only of time passing, but of a character undergoing maturating learning as, for instance, from sustained suffering in the process. Signs of an interior change vital to the narrative can begin in the montage, or otherwise patently as the story resumes. Staggered thusly (like a recurring, subtle melody in the string section of an orchestra) and so only gradually anticipated by the viewer, when the change finally manifests full-blown as vital to the story, the realized “growth” or change is credible. This credibility can actually contribute to the suspension of disbelief that is so vital to the believability of the story and thus its constructed world and characters.