BEFORE: Well, this was the obvious choice, right? Emma Thompson carries over from "Nanny McPhee". Don't even have to think about this one - you see how I can sort of cut my linking workload in half just by pairing up movies together. And two movies together sort of double their chances of fitting in somewhere, as there are twice as many options, some on each end.
Anyway, it's that time of year where I sometimes have to help get a film qualified for the Oscars, usually an animated short and it's always a very difficult procedure. I can keep an eye on that deadline for months, and then some catastrophe will strike, as it did this year - I didn't read the rules closely enough, I thought we had until October 15 to qualify this film (either through an award from an Academy-qualifying festival, or a 7-day screening in L.A.) but upon further review of the rules, I realized the qualifying event had to occur by September 30 at the latest. Damn, we lost two weeks just like THAT because I didn't read the fine print. Wow, on Monday I thought maybe I'd be fired for sure - yeah, I've been busy but keeping an eye on those Academy rules is a very important part of my job.
But the saving grace during this pandemic year is that the Academy opened up the qualification rules a bit, to make things easier, and there are now SIX cities or metropolitan areas in the U.S. where we can qualify the film. My boss made a few phone calls and we connected with an indie theater we know in San Francisco, they agreed to screen the short before their features for a week, starting on Friday, so we're saved. Whew, that was a close one, I was willing to wait to see if the film would win a qualifying festival award, but my boss didn't agree with that plan, so we had to scramble at the last minute. Literally, we're screening during the last eligible week, another week and we'd have to wait another whole year to try to get it nominated. So at least now if the film doesn't get nominated, it will be merit-based and I can't be blamed for that, not if I at least get all the qualifying paperwork filed in time. My job tends to get very stressful this time of year, and then there's NY Comic-Con in October, but that's another type of stress that's coming up soon.
THE PLOT: Nanny McPhee arrives to help a harried young mother running the family farm while her husband is away at war, and she uses her magic to teach the woman's children and their two spoiled cousins five new lessons.
AFTER: The Nanny McPhee series, on the other hand, has been nominated for zero Oscars, just pointing that out. The first movie is clearly better than the second, and if you find someone who disagrees with that, well, they're clearly not right in the head. It's a very rare sequel that's better than the first film in a series, I think most will agree it's just "Aliens" and "The Empire Strikes Back" that could be said to outshine their narrative predecessors. In this light, "Nanny McPhee Returns" was like the "Wonder Woman 1984" of its day.
Actually, that's not a bad analogy, because both characters are seen in two movies that take place decades apart, and so far there's really been no explanation for where either character was in-between, or how they both managed to live for so long. The odd thing was that Diana was seen as a small girl in flashback in "WW84", so clearly Amazonian warriors DO age, but at some point, they just stop? For Ms. McPhee, (little c, big p) after last being seen in Victorian England, circa 1870 (?) she comes back during World War II - where has she been? They really just say that there's "a war" on, or the children's father is "away at war", which makes it seem like a holiday, and I'm betting it's not. The cars suggest World War 2 instead of WWI, and there's talk of bombs being dropped on Britain, so this must take place in the 1940's - that's 7 decades of life during which Nanny McPhee is unaccounted for, so will there be more stories told in that gap, or are we done?
To drive the point home, the BABY character from the first film is played by Maggie Smith in this one, so that fits with the timeline, baby plus 70 or 75 years equals senior citizen - but again, how did Nanny McPhee stay the same age? Magic, duh. But are we then to believe that there were no naughty children for her to bother between 1875 and 1940? Or maybe she's been active that whole time, just not having any adventures that were movie-worthy? Was she still around in the groove-tastic swinging 1970's (crossover with Austin Powers!) and is she still alive today, outsmarting the super-bratty, mega-entitled kids of today? We need her more than ever, I say.
The "Nanny McPhee" movies are based on a 3-book series about Nurse Matilda, only there are big differences in the storyline of the first book and the first film. Mrs. Brown's not dead in the book, for one thing. But I thought the first movie put her death to good use, since it got Aunt Adelaide into the story and forced Mr. Brown to seek out a new wife, which was a pretty good jumping on point and also explained one reason WHY the children were being naughty, because they didn't want a stepmother. But this second movie didn't follow the second book at all, it just wiped the board clean and started with new characters (OK, except for two...) in a new decade.
Isabel Green is a mother whose husband has gone off to war, leaving her to run the family farm with her three children and ALSO work a job in the local village shop, where the older woman who runs the shop keeps doing everything wrong. Yeah, dementia comedy doesn't really work for me, guys. Mrs. Docherty unpacks all the flour on to the floor and fills the drawers full of syrup, and that's all now contaminated product that needs to be thrown out. Not funny. Then Isabel's rich and spoiled niece and nephew are sent to visit the farm (though it's a bit unclear WHY) and the farm kinds and the rich kids don't get along, so there's now two sets of kids at war with each other, and that's when Nanny McPhee shows up, when she's needed to maintain order.
But maintaining order last time meant casting spells so the naughty kids would feel sick, and learn a lesson about pretending to be sick. The lessons here are quite different, like I'm not sure what point exactly was made by bringing the goat and cow into the house to sleep in beds with the children - what was that all about? I guess maybe the new lessons reflect the changing times - both the jump to the 1940's and the five years between the two films, one released in 2005 and the sequel in 2010. But the lessons are clunky at best, in fact there are a lot of things about this movie that feel very clunky, like I didn't understand the motivations of the two "evil" female characters, Miss Topsey and Miss Turvey. They were trying to persuade Isabel's brother-in-law, Phil, to get her to sell the farm, so that Phil could turn his part of the farm over to Topsey and Turvey. But, who WERE they, and why did they want the farm, I guess Phil owed them money from a gambling debt, but why wouldn't they want the value of the farm, instead of the farm itself, which was covered in mud and poo?
The bit with selling the piglets was all wonky, too - the kids are all happy to have their piglets bought, which brings money to the farm, but don't the kids realize WHY somebody bought the piglets? I'm guessing to make bacon, so are the kids that dumb that they don't realize they're selling their friendly, talented pigs to be eaten? I mean, yeah, it was the 1940's and everybody loved bacon and there were no vegan kids, but still. That's all very clunky, too - "YAY! The nice man with money is going to eat our pigs!"
And the big climax at the end, with the unexploded bomb, God, it's set up so obviously, with the bomb warden early on essentially foreshadowing the later events in the absolute most obvious way, and then there's the bird companion of Nanny McPhee and that weird story about him eating window putty - gee, I wonder if that will become important later on, too... Clunk city. I guess maybe small children won't see the end scene with the bomb coming, but any adult who's seen, you know, movies before shouldn't be surprised, not one bit. And then nobody thinks it's a bad idea for a couple of children to try to defuse an unexploded bomb - WTF? Hey, maybe it's a better idea to just NOT do that, and leave it alone? Your lessons are quite dangerous, Nanny McPhee.
Other little things are story fails, too, like it's great that the film depicts a woman raising her children by herself while their father is away, and she's running the farm AND she has another job, big plus for feminism here - only she CAN'T manage it all, the story dictates that she needs Nanny McPhee's help, so that's like two steps forward and one step back, right? And do the spoiled, entitled rich kids ever learn to not be spoiled and entitled? They learn to wear farm clothes, but I'm not sure that represents a true change in character. There are perhaps also unrealistic expectations shown here about the likelihood of a father returning home from war - but no spoilers here.
Also starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "The Kindergarten Teacher"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Asa Butterfield (last seen in "Greed"), Lil Woods, Oscar Steer, Eros Vlahos (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Rosie Taylor-Ritson, Maggie Smith (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Haywire"), Ralph Fiennes (last heard in "Dolittle"), Sam Kelly (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Sinead Matthews (ditto), Katy Brand, Bill Bailey, Nonso Anozie (last seen in "All Is True"), Daniel Mays (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Ed Stoppard (last seen in "Judy"), Toby Sedgwick (last seen in "Stan & Ollie").
RATING: 4 out of 10 bloater paste sandwiches (no thanks, I'll pass...)
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