Why do films do such a bad job of portraying old people?

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is full of the usual cinematic cliches about old people – but at least it, for once, tries to deal with some of the big issues about ageing

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ follows a group of British retirees who decide to “outsource” their retirement to less expensive and seemingly exotic India. Enticed by advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and bolstered with visions of a life of leisure, they arrive to find the palace a shell of its former self. Though the new environment is less luxurious than imagined, they are forever transformed by their shared experiences, discovering that life and love can begin again when you let go of the past. Starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy And Dev Patel.

We certainly have a problem with ageing. To fend it off, we’re prepared to smother ourselves in quacksalvers’ unguents, submit to abusive surgery, dye our hair and lie about our age. We treat those no longer able to disguise its ravages with embarrassed condescension or worse. We daren’t even call them “old” any more, but must rely on euphemisms like senior or third-ager, as if referring to victims of an unspeakable affliction.

The media are usually accused of helping to shape inconvenient attitudes, and in this case cinema gets its share of the blame. After all, in pursuit of the teen dollar, it has championed attributes to which only the young can be expected to aspire. Unsurprisingly, the tribunes of elderly people complain that the landscape of the big screen is no country for old men.

To some extent, this is unfair. Dumbledore, Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi have dispensed the wisdom of the aged, even though society at large has forgotten it ever existed. The likes ofGran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, Tokyo Story,Fear Eats the Soul, Harold and Maude, The Sunshine Boys, Driving Miss Daisy and The Straight Story have portrayed older characters with both compassion and respect.

Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that the complainants have a point. Sometimes, as in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or Sunset Boulevard, ageing has been treated as a source of horror. More often, elderly characters have simply been pushed to the fringes of the action, and, by implication, to the fringes of life.

In 2005, two academics assessed different age-groups’ prominence in 88 top-grossing films and compared it to their presence in the population. Thirtysomethings were heavily over-represented and fortysomethings did OK, while fiftysomethings were significantly under-represented and the over-60s severely so.

Once marginalised and therefore cut down in screen-time, older characters have had to be stereotyped, with often unbecoming results. There have been a good few kindly old grandmas, but more often the elderly have been shown as ineffectual, grumpy, behind the times, depressed, lonely, slow-witted, sickly, whining, rude, miserly, hard-of-hearing, ugly, interfering, heartless, intransigent, doddering, mentorish, frisky or profane .

However, with the coming of our own millennium, cinema determined to do better. It was now in pursuit of the increasingly valuable grey dollar, and out to suck up to the old as eagerly as it had sucked up to the young.

Recently, Red (short for “retired, extremely dangerous”) saw Bruce Willis reassembling a team of ageing black-ops operatives to prevail in cheery mayhem. The Expendables brought back action stars from the 1980s to make mincemeat of less venerable bad guys. Unfortunately, such efforts failed to satisfy the nigglers. These films, along with those featuring other kinds of improbably hoary hellraisers, were condemned for requiring the old to ape the behaviour of the young. Old people too far gone to manage this, it was suggested, would only be further demeaned.

Still, the movies had other tricks up their sleeve. Films such as Iris, Away from Her and The Iron Lady directly addressed the issues posed by infirmity in old age. Their spin was heavily sympathetic, but even so they weren’t always welcomed. Some argued that they sanitised the conditions they depicted, thereby belittling real-life sufferers’ needs. Others made a contrary complaint.

Last year saw the publication of The Silvering Screen, by Canadian academic Sally Chivers. She objected to films that “rely on illness or disability narratives to convey the social burden of growing old,” thereby treating ageing as a disease. What cinema ought to be doing, she suggested, is promulgating “the idea that an old person has value that exceeds the value attached to young appearance”.

A big ask, you might have thought. Still, along comes The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and, boy, does it do its damnedest.

Admittedly, its septet of seniors out to find themselves in the east are required to display traditional old-folk foibles, like confusing Wi-Fi and wireless, and distrusting doctors with a different skin colour. Foreign food? “If I can’t pronounce it, I don’t want to eat it.” All the same, they’re grappling with big stuff.

For them, later life means self-realisation, not inconsequence. That’s getting your first-ever job, finding love, breaking free from a stagnant marriage or overcoming a lifetime’s guilt. Their guidance saves the young from making enormous mistakes, and even succeeds in humanising the staff of a call centre. No one is expected to slaughter terrorists or seduce teenage lovelies.

Ageing isn’t pathologised. The only sign of debility is one readily operable gammy hip. Death, when it puts in an appearance, is sudden, painless and discreet. So Dr Chivers should be happy, if not her adversaries.

But does the film endear us to later life? Sadly, no. For heart-warming though the action is, it’s hopelessly implausible. In this world, “I’m lonely,” is a successful chat-up line, and a ratty old Hobnob addict can metamorphose into a finance whizz capable of rescuing an ailing business. The sunny Jaipur hotel turns out to enshrine an alternate reality. What ageing means there isn’t what it means in the world around us. However much we emulate the positive outlook of its fortunate inhabitants, we’re unlikely to be similarly rewarded.

In non-exotic environments, ageing may indeed endow some with their own Indian summer of leisure, affection and fulfilment. More can expect to encounter varying degrees of irrelevance, decline, sickness, hardship, regret, abandonment, loss and loneliness. We don’t like any of these things: that’s why we dread old age.

Films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel can offer us only a brief respite from our fear of what’s to come. To provide enduring reassurance, cinema would have to decontaminate ageing as we actually know it. Even for the big screen, that may just be too much of a challenge.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/feb/28/films-bad-job-portraying-old-people