BEFORE: Emily Blunt carries over from "A Quiet Place", and this sort of highlights a big problem with my process - genre whiplash. Sure, 6 out of the last 7 films count as some kind of "fantasy" film, but it's been a mix of horror and sci-fi and children's films, all mashed together. Even just the three Emily Blunt films in a row have zigzagged from animation to horror and now back to a musical fantasy. I can virtually guarantee that nobody else has ever watched "Sherlock Gnomes", "A Quiet Place" and "Mary Poppins Returns" all in a row, because why would they?
Of course I've seen the original film, I was raised in the 1970's so by the time I'd seen 1964's "Mary Poppins" in, let's say, 1973 or 1974, it was already a beloved classic film. I think I got the film on DVD, recorded off TCM about 2 or 3 years ago, once I realized that I didn't have regular access to a copy. This one and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" were mandatory viewing, according to my mother.
THE PLOT: Decades after her original visit, the magical nanny returns to help the Banks siblings and Michael's children through a difficult time in their lives.
AFTER: I'm going to try to be very nice tonight, because of the appreciation I once had for the original "Mary Poppins" film - yes, I was indoctrinated into the cult of Disney at a very young age, for the first 8 years of my life that was ALL that my mother would let me see at the movies - of course, back then that's all there really was for kids, there was no Dreamworks or Sony Animation or Gibli Studios, there were two Disney films a year, if you were lucky, or they would bring around a classic like "Snow White" or "Cinderella" for the new generation of kids that hadn't seen it before. Also, bear in mind that my mother got her movie recommendations from the Pilot, which was the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston - and Disney films were some of the few that they deemed "acceptable" or "non-blaspemous".
Time went on, and I saw my first PG film (1976's "King Kong") and then "Star Wars" blew my mind the next year, and suddenly my world opened up to a ton of movie options. So I left Disney behind, as one of those childhood things, and didn't go back when they came out with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Lion King" or even "Beauty and the Beast" at first, because I was in my early 20's and out of school, working and in a relationship and trying to be an adult, so what need did I have for kids' movies? Sure, I missed out on a lot, but I eventually went back and reconciled with the Disney organization, and caught what I'd missed.
But still, something's missing, and "Mary Poppins Returns" kind of shined a light on it - maybe things would be different if I'd had a kid or two and I could see the world through their eyes, but that's not the life I chose for myself. I'm forced to conclude that Disney films, and the "Mary Poppins" films specifically, didn't really change - but I'm no longer in the same place. Again I'm remembering the "Star Wars" prequels, when they released "The Phantom Menace" in 1998 it had been 15 years since "Return of the Jedi", and the people who were fans as teens had become adults, and some of them reacted by saying, "Hey, what is this? This isn't Star Wars, this is a film for kids!" The films didn't really change, but it was the viewers that got older, they were no longer in the same place, do you know what I mean?
So this is an enormous effort on the part of many, many people, to re-create what made the first "Mary Poppins" film great, and magical, and entertaining - so why did so much of this leave me cold? Am I that dead inside, that I don't have the same sense of wonder any more? Like maybe the sun is still shining just as brightly as it once did, but I've been turned away from it and living in the shadows for so long, that now when the light does reach me, it tends to blind me? Or am I so jaded by all the other super-effects heavy films that I've seen over the years that a journey through an underwater fantasy world, plus another animated one that's seen on a china bowl, doesn't really thrill me? Man, I've seen alien armies fighting on distant worlds, I've seen demonic monsters snacking on humans like potato chips, and I've seen superheroes teaming up to take down robot overlords. How am I supposed to be thrilled by Mary Poppins taking kids into imaginary bathtub-land? See, it's not you, "Mary Poppins", I'm pretty sure it's me. I'm just expecting way too much these days.
If you have kids, and you want to watch this with them, or through them, you'll probably have a fine time. For me, though, I didn't feel very connected to this film until near the end, when Dick Van Dyke showed up as an elderly banker. He played two roles in the original film, a banker and Bert the chimney sweep, and I'm not sure I realized that at the time - I was still in the process of figuring out what actors were, and that movies weren't real, so if someone told me that an actor played two different characters in the same film, that might have blown my mind. I guess this elderly banker is supposed to be the son of the elderly banker he played in the first film? Anyway, Dick van Dyke really perked up the film and saved it in the end, in more ways than one.
Another thing I did like was that it moved the timeline forward, even if Mary Poppins somehow remained the same age as before, or thereabouts, with no rational explanation. She's a magical figure, she doesn't need to follow the same rules as other characters like getting old. So while the first film was set in 1910, pre-war Edwardian London, with women trying to get the right to vote and such, this one takes place sometime in the 1930's, the kids from the first film are now adults, and one has kids of his own, and oh, yeah, there's a Depression going on (though they use the euphemism "slump" here, because Depressions are so, well, depressing...) and people are having trouble making ends meet and missing mortgage payments, and the banks are foreclosing. It's very timely, because if the U.S. economy keeps going the way it is, we're just one trade or tariff war away from looking at the Great Depression as "the good old days". Bankers and real estate people are evil, kids, in any era.
The ending number had me feeling pretty good, too - set in the park where a balloon lady sells balloons that help people float in the air (provided they "believe"), and the song is called "Nowhere To Go But Up". Hey, that's got a lot of different meanings, it could strike a chord for anyone who's feeling down or has suffered a loss, personal or financial. Perfect for the Depression-era setting, right? But what seemed horribly out of place was allowing BMX "extreme" bike stunts as the army of lamplighters pedals across London to save the day. By all rights, that should not have been allowed, since such things didn't exist in the 1930's. Also, if I'm being nit-picky, giving Meryl Streep a horrible Russian accent made no sense, and also made it very difficult to understand the lines she was singing. (I had no access to captions on the version I watched, but they sure would have helped.)
Some of the plot points in this sequel came from the 2nd book in Travers' series, "Mary Poppins Comes Back", though greatly altered to move the story forward a few decades. And Disney has been trying to make a sequel since shortly after the 1964 original was released, though the biggest push was probably in the late 1980's, when Jeffrey Katzenberg dealt with the author, and the negotiations were tougher than the ones Walt Disney had with P.L. Travers, as shown in the movie "Saving Mr. Banks". There were a ton of arbitrary rules, like Mary Poppins could not be seen wearing the color red. Travers took her own stab at making a screenplay for a sequel, only by the time it was finished, Julie Andrews had retired from acting, and they were considering casting Michael Jackson as Bert's brother, an ice cream vendor in the park. Can you imagine that?
Maybe someone needs to pitch another sequel, with Mary Poppins returning to the Banks family during another troubling time, maybe during World War II, when the Germans are bombing London. There's a plot with some real bite to it, maybe young John Banks could be 20 years old and drafted into serving on the front lines, and Mary Poppins could fly over the battlefield and use her powers to get the stop the weapons or fight the Nazis somehow. Maybe she could even go to Hitler's bunker and give him a "spoonful of sugar" to help the poison go down... Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
I should probably check in with my mother to see if she's seen this sequel, I bet she went to the theater to check it out. She's in her 70's and still watching children's movies - and they say I never grew up, what about HER? I pay the cable bill for my parents (it seems only fair, if they paid for my college...) and I noticed that she watched "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" on PPV. Well, they don't get any of the premium channels, so I guess if she really wants to see a recent film, she's got to order it On Demand. But considering I spent 12-15 years with her telling me what movies I could and couldn't watch, I think turn-about is fair play - I'm going to have to call their cable provider and tell them not to let my mother order any more children's movies. OK, I'm not really going to do that, but it would be hilarious.
Also starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The Lobster"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "The Pink Panther 2"), Julie Walters (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "The Post"), Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Gaslight"), Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson, David Warner (last seen in "Tom Jones") Jim Norton, Jeremy Swift, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (last seen in "The Commuter"), Noma Dumezweni, Sudha Bhuchar, Tarik Frimpong, Steve Nicolson, and the voices of Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Mascots"), Mark Addy (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Edward Hibbert.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cherry blossoms
No comments:
Post a Comment