‘Downton’s’ Wilton gets crusty in ‘Marigold’

There is one in every crowd. The crank. The naysayer. The buzz kill. It’s Penelope Wilton’s dubious honor to play that character, Jean, in John Madden’s new comedy, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Wilton says of the role. “She wasn’t a stereotypical baddie whom everyone could hate. She’s a woman who has a journey, like the others, but it’s a more complicated journey.”

The journey, at least physically, is to India. Jean and the “others” are senior citizens seeking a sunny, cheap alternative to retirement in dreary, expensive Britain. Their golden years are being outsourced, like technical support or sales calls. Each of them has a reason — emotional, financial — to abandon home and loved ones, plus they’re promised a life of ease and luxury in a grand colonial hotel.

Unfortunately, the promise is an empty one. Much of the hotel’s appeal in advertisements has been Digitally altered by its enthusiastic, though inept, part owner, played by “Slumdog Millionaire’s” Dev Patel. The place is a dump, though a charming one.

While the other retirees — played by a who’s who of British actors of a certain age, including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup— cope with the hotel’s shortcomings and come to terms with the crowds, the squalor and the many maddening inconveniences of India, Jean does not. Part of the problem is, as Wilton puts it, that “some people will never change. You take yourself with you.” The other part, related to that, is that she’s trapped in a loveless marriage with Nighy’s