Old Yorker

  • Mary Poppins Returns

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Marshall (2018)

    Pre-eminence in directing movie musicals isn’t a keen competition in today’s Hollywood but Rob Marshall can reasonably lay claim to the mantle of go-to guy.  The colossal commercial success of La Land and The Greatest Showman during the last two years has tended to overshadow the box-office performance of Marshall musicals over the last twenty.  While Nine (2009) lost money, Chicago (2002) and even Into the Woods (2014) made a profit – and Marshall’s latest, less than two weeks after its North American release, has already more than recouped its budget[1].  Walt Disney Productions’ Mary Poppins Returns, a belated sequel to their 1964 classic (directed by Robert Stevenson), is nothing special.  It gives the impression of being designed by committee – nearly every number is conceived and placed to correspond with one in the earlier film – yet lacks a coherent style.  The largely jolly songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are serviceable but, only four days after seeing the film, I’ve retained none of the tunes in my head.  The picture as a whole isn’t a patch on its distant predecessor, not least because of its anxiety to do right by it.  Marshall struggles to shake off a feeling of pastiche.  But it’s a relief – and rather a surprise – that Returns is as enjoyable as it is.

    Set in London during the 1930s Depression, the movie centres on the family of Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw):  the little boy in the first Mary Poppins is now a recently widowed father of three – Annabel (Pixie Davis), John (Nathanael Saleh) and Georgie (Joel Dawson).  The family lives in the same house on Cherry Tree Lane where Michael and his elder sister Jane (Emily Mortimer) grew up.  A would-be artist, Michael has a part-time job as a clerk at the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, where his father once worked, but his financial situation is precarious and about to get worse.  Michael has fallen behind with repayments on the loan he took out from the Fidelity Fiduciary; unless he can repay it in full within a very few days, the family home will be repossessed.  Jane’s and Michael’s father left them shares in the bank that could be sufficient to cover the loan but the shares certificate is nowhere to be found.  In the original Mary Poppins, the Banks parents’ predicament was that they urgently needed a replacement nanny for their unruly children.  The plot of Mary Poppins Returns is set in motion by Michael’s lack of funds and this instantly shifts the balance of things.  The firm hand of a new nanny isn’t going to solve the problem of house repossession, which dominates the story that follows.  As a result, Mary Poppins never takes charge of proceedings in quite the way she did in 1964.

    That’s obviously not the fault of Emily Blunt, who’s highly proficient as the title character even if her speaking voice always sounds put on.  Blunt’s voice is more natural when she sings, which she does very well (except for the odd – in two ways – American vowel sound).  Mary’s chimney-sweep pal from the first film has now become a lamplighter, Jack (once apprentice to Bert the sweep).  Best known as the creator and star of In the Heights and Hamilton on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda is comfortable on camera – and careful to ensure his cockney accent is less off-the-wall than Dick Van Dyke’s notoriously was.  But though he’s likeable, Miranda is less vivid than Van Dyke too.  The latter, now in his ninety-fourth year, has a cameo late on as Mr Dawes Jr (ie the son of Mr Dawes Sr, whom a heavily aged-up Van Dyke played, along with Bert, in 1964).  Dawes, the chairman of the bank, confirms that the tuppence Michael’s father once invested for him in the Fidelity Fiduciary has since grown to a sum in excess of the bank loan.  Mr Dawes also takes the opportunity to sack rascally William Wilkins (Colin Firth), the bank bigwig who has tried everything to evict Michael and his family.

    In the first Mary Poppins, the Banks paterfamilias (David Tomlinson) starts off preoccupied with his bank job and impatient with his children, and therefore has to learn to get his priorities right.  Mary Poppins Returns tries to rework this idea by suggesting that the adult Michael somehow needs to rediscover the child within him.  This time, though, Michael has compelling reasons for losing a sense of fun:  he’s grieving for his wife and desperately worried about losing the family’s home.  Besides, Ben Whishaw’s Michael is so expressive that you always sense the presence in the man of the boy he used to be:  Whishaw renders the father’s conversion (the road to which again involves a battered kite) superfluous.  His sensitive speak-singing makes the potentially maudlin ‘A Conversation’, in which Michael addresses his lost wife, genuinely touching.  But this hints at another problem in the film:  not even Mary Poppins can take the sting out of death and certainly not a young mother’s premature death.  Emily Blunt, as she sings ‘The Place Where Lost Things Go’ to Michael’s children, is too honest a performer to suggest otherwise.  Blunt feels the truth of the situation in a way that contradicts the lyrics’ bland reassurance (‘Nothing’s gone for ever/Only out of place’).

    Although the writer David Magee (Finding Neverland, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Life of Pi) draws on the P L Travers stories, the plot is largely an invention.  Magee’s script introduces a few ideas that it then drops.  Mrs Banks (Glynis Johns) in the first film was a suffragette.  Jane wears trousers and is following in her mother’s political activist footsteps.  She works for a trade unionish set-up – SPRUCE (the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Underpaid Citizens of England).  Jack and Jane (well played by Emily Mortimer) take a definite shine to each other but without a romance taking off.  He also clearly admires her SPRUCE activities and the film seems to approve too.  There’s a point at which you wonder if it’s going to be politically bold enough to have organised labour save the day for the Banks family.  With the bank’s midnight-on-Friday deadline for repayment of the loan almost upon Michael, the only solution is to turn back time.  Jack and his fellow lamplighters climb the Big Ben tower to adjust the hands of the clock to a few minutes before twelve.  It’s a well-staged, suspenseful sequence but eventually a bit of an anti-climax:  Jack and co can’t do the necessary without the intervention of Mary Poppins.  Individual magical powers trump proletarian team effort almost contemptuously.

    Still, the lamplighters feature in one of the film’s two most satisfying numbers, ‘Trip a Little Light Fantastic’ (the sweeps’ ‘Step in Time’ equivalent), which follows immediately after the other highlight, ‘Turning Turtle’.  This is performed during a visit by the Banks children, their nanny and Jack to Mary’s cousin Topsy.  She’s based on Travers’s Topsy-Turvy character but more essentially Meryl Streep, whose theatrical verve gives Mary Poppins Returns a sustained shot in the arm throughout her few minutes on screen.  The film emerges from the shadow of its forerunner as the priority of those behind the camera briefly shifts to making Streep’s appearance in front of it worthwhile.  Topsy is emphatically yet impenetrably Eastern European:  ‘That’s an interesting accent, what is it?’ asks Jack pleasantly, as the script and Streep enjoy a joke about her legendary vocal versatility.  Her make-up (by Roy Helland, of course) and dramatically coloured clothes are a cut above too – the latter by some way the best thing Sandy Powell has designed for the extensive wardrobe.

    Mary Poppins’s visual effects, which won an Oscar in 1965, now look charmingly simple.  I feared Rob Marshall would try to keep up with the pyrotechnical Joneses but he doesn’t:  in this respect at least, the new film’s deference to the old one helps.  As in the original, there are sequences where human actors and animated characters share the screen.  Here and elsewhere the picture is visually dynamic but only rarely frenetic (though the director’s tendency to over-edit, which detracted from the rhythm of some of Chicago’s numbers, is occasionally in evidence again).  Marshall is also sensibly upfront in acknowledging the musical lineage:  the soundtrack repeatedly includes phrases from the Sherman brothers’ songs for the original movie.  By the time it reaches its celebratory climax in the park near the Bankses’ home, Mary Poppins Returns looks to be sliding out of a 1930s Slump and back into the Edwardian setting of the original.  The revivified Michael, in a jaunty straw boater, appears really to have travelled back to the era of his childhood.

    The new Banks children don’t have quite the natural eccentric charm of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber but the three roles have been cast thoughtfully and sensitively:  each of Pixie Davis, Nathanael Saleh and Joel Dawson is individually likeable and they’re a well-balanced team.  (Karen Dotrice makes a brief guest appearance as a passer-by near the Bankses’ home.)  In contrast, the casting of non-white actors in a few minor roles is doubly deplorable, not only tokenistic but also requiring the actors concerned to play innocuous characters.  William Wilkins’s associates, who arrive in Cherry Tree Lane with the repossession order, are a good-cop-bad-cop act so Kobna Holdbrook-Smith must be the good part of the duo (Jeremy Swift is the bad cop).  As Wilkins’s secretary, Noma Dumezweni has little to do but offer the Banks children free sweets.

    In the hands of Colin Firth, the sly and heartless villain Wilkins is a feeble adversary – an irritated rather than a nasty piece of work.  More surprising is an unusual uneasy contribution from Julie Walters as Michael’s housekeeper.  Dick Van Dyke, incredibly, isn’t the oldest member of the cast:  Angela Lansbury, a few weeks his senior, has a cameo as the balloon lady in the park finale.  In the same territory, earlier in the film, the underrated Steve Nicolson is amusing as a park attendant who repeatedly tells the children to keep off the grass.  David Warner is the elderly Admiral Boom, who also appeared in the first film.  It’s a nice joke that fiddling with the clock hands means that Boom’s ritual firing of his cannon coincides, just for once, with Big Ben’s chimes.

    27 December 2018

    [1] The film, which cost $130m, was released in the US on 19 December 2018.  At 31 December 2018, its total worldwide gross takings stood at $174.5m.

     

  • Citizen Kane

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1941)

    Five times running, between 1962 and 2002 inclusive, Citizen Kane topped Sight & Sound‘s once-a-decade poll of critics’ best films of all time.   (It was just outside the top ten in the first such poll in 1952 and pushed into second place by Vertigo in 2012.)  The film’s storytelling, visuals and use of overlapping dialogue were all, in various ways, innovative and influential.  There are many startling touches (that screeching cockatoo for one) which you simply don’t expect in a Hollywood picture of the era.  Pauline Kael suggested that Kane ‘may be more fun than any other great movie’ and there’s no doubt it’s richly entertaining.  It’s not hard, though, both to admire and enjoy Orson Welles’s unique cinema debut and to suspect it’s been overrated.  According to David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film, the title character’s ‘enterprise is so evidently Welles’s … his surrender to glory is equally the overwhelming of the performer by his own glamour’.  I don’t have a problem with reading films with the benefit of hindsight – it’s often practically impossible to see them for what they originally were.  Even so, Thomson’s mid-1970s yoking of the personality and fate of this one’s protagonist with the personality and fate of its creator makes you wonder how much Welles’s subsequent creative travails have nourished the myth and reputation of Citizen Kane.

    Herman J Mankiewicz and Welles shared the writing credit and their relative contributions to the screenplay have been much debated over the years (notably in Kael’s 1971 essay Raising Kane and reactions to it).   What’s not in dispute are the narrative’s exhilarating combination of clarity and complexity, especially in the early stages, and the flow of unusually witty and aphoristic dialogue.  The film opens on the iron fencing and ‘No Trespassing’ sign at the perimeter of an estate steeped in shadow and desuetude.  Inside a mansion of Gothic aspect, an elderly man lies in bed.  He holds in his hand a snow globe and utters the word ‘Rosebud’ before the globe falls from his hand and smashes on the floor.   A nurse enters to draw the bed covers over the dead man.  Welles then cuts to a cinema newsreel obituary of the newspaper owner and publisher Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), whose vast Florida property the camera roamed in the preceding sequence.  The place’s name was Xanadu and the ‘News on the March’ narrator intones the opening lines from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan to introduce Kane’s potted life story.  The newsreel, as well as being formally distinctive, is a nifty means of instantly conveying Kane’s celebrity and biographical information about him.

    The end of the newsreel reveals that it has been screened not in a cinema but in a projection room, watched there by the team who put it together.  The boss man Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt) tells his journalist Thompson (William Alland, also the voice of the ‘News on the March’ narrative):

    ‘It’s a good short, Thompson, but what it needs is an angle.  All that picture tells us is that Charles Foster Kane is dead.  I know that – I read the papers … You see, Thompson, it isn’t enough to show what a man did.  You’ve got to tell us who he was … What were the last words Kane said on earth?  Maybe he told us all about himself on his deathbed.’

    Thompson and Rawlston both know Kane’s last word was ‘Rosebud’.  Rawlston instructs Thompson to delay releasing the newsreel for a week or two and, in the meantime, to ‘Find out about Rosebud!’ – a mission that supplies the framework of the story that follows, in the course of which Kane’s life is explored and revealed in more detail.  Citizen Kane is rich in narrative invention.  Another famous example is the summary of the decline of Kane’s first marriage, to Emily Norton (Rut Warrick), a niece of the American President, constructed through consecutive short breakfast-table exchanges between the couple, over a period of some years.

    Beside this compressed and imaginative storytelling, the failure of Kane’s second marriage, to the amateur(ish) singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), is a protracted business.  And whereas Kane’s rise to power as a yellow press magnate (the chief inspiration for the character is supposedly William Randolph Hearst) is described succinctly, there’s a more extended account of the termination of his short-lived political career.  Susan Alexander is a key figure in this episode too.  The exposure of Kane’s affair with her capsizes his campaign for election as Governor of New York and brings to an end his marriage to Emily.  Each time I’ve watched the film (perhaps four times over as many decades), I’ve been puzzled by how much screen time is then devoted to Kane’s obstinate, increasingly desperate attempts to launch Susan on a career as a big-time opera singer which she, like the critics who savage her performances, knows she’s not up to and resents.  This seems meant to illustrate Kane’s arrogant determination to make things happen through the force of his will.  But since the failure of Susan’s operatic career isn’t typical of his life it’s not easy to see it as reflecting something larger and essential about Kane’s egotism.

    David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary piece notes that ‘Anyone can see how much Welles’s eye had learned from German Expressionism and its influence on stage production in the 1930s’.   In this respect too, however, Citizen Kane looks different from any other product of contemporary Hollywood and a film noir almost before its time.  (Although The Maltese Falcon was released later in the same year, it was well into the decade before noir became anything approaching a genre.)  Kane may be noir in terms of visual style and mood rather than characters and storyline but the chiaroscuro of Gregg Toland’s black-and-white photography is so expressive that it seems integral to the piece and makes appearance and content virtually inseparable.  (Besides, the definition of a film noir has retrospectively become broad enough to accommodate all manner of ‘dark’ matter[1].)   Citizen Kane is also the exemplary evidence of Toland’s pioneering development of deep-focus cinematography.   The dramatisation of physical scale, especially in the vast interiors of Xanadu, is still impressive.

    Orson Welles isn’t a favourite actor of mine but the rhodomontade and shallowness that are sometimes limitations work for him here:  they give Kane’s spiritual deracination an extra level of reality.  Thanks to his dynamic plausibility and surface charm, Welles is well equipped for the scenes describing Kane’s meteoric rise but he’s remarkable as the older man too – especially when Susan has walked out on Kane and he trashes her room at Xanadu.   The ‘boy wonder’ Welles was still only in his mid-twenties at the time; as the elderly Kane, he may be helped by padding but one area in which Citizen Kane does now show its age is the ageing make-up.  It’s excellent in the smaller adjustments needed in the appearance of Welles and Ruth Warrick in the scenes-from-a-marriage montage but Welles’s old man look is Gothic to a nearly comical degree. The geriatric appearance of Joseph Cotten, as Kane’s friend and colleague Jedediah Leland, whom Thompson interviews in a retirement home, isn’t convincing either – and Cotten, excellent as the younger Leland, is too physically perky in these scenes.  On the other hand, Everett Sloane, though actually several years younger than Cotten, is perfectly credible as the older Bernstein, another friend and employee of Kane.  Sloane’s not having matinee idol looks may have helped the make-up designer Maurice Seiderman. The casting of Buddy Swan as the eight-year-old Kane in the crucial flashbacks to his childhood in Colorado was inspired:  there’s a mysteriously strong connection between him and Welles’s older man.

    At the end of his search for the truth and nearly at the end of the film, Thompson still hasn’t discovered the meaning of ‘Rosebud’ (and the viewer still hasn’t discovered how he and Rawlston knew this was Kane’s last word before his lonely death).  The journalist concludes that:

    ‘Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything.  I don’t think any word explains a man’s life.  No – I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle – a missing piece.’

    To underline the point, Thompson drops some jigsaw pieces into a box.  (We’ve seen Susan repeatedly working on, though never completing, jigsaws in the slow death of her marriage to Kane.)  As he prepares to leave Xanadu for the last time, Thompson picks up his overcoat from where it’s been resting, atop a heap of junk.  The coat’s removal reveals a small sled – the same sled with which the boy Kane was playing in the Colorado snow the day that Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), the banker who became Charles’s legal guardian, arrived to take him away from his mother (Agnes Moorehead) and father (Harry Shannon).  The camera then moves to a furnace.  Things are shovelled into it, including, still at the top of the pile, the sled.  As the camera comes closer, it shows a faded image of a rosebud, then the word ‘ROSEBUD’, on the sled – presumably a brand name but, with its implications of love and pristine potential, a decidedly evocative one.

    Is the final Rosebud revelation meant to explain the life of Charles Foster Kane?  The verging-on-apocalyptic quality of the furnace flames devouring the sled, reinforced by Bernard Herrmann’s score, might suggest so but Pauline Kael was probably nearer the mark when she wrote in Raising Kane that:

    ‘The mystery in Kane is largely fake, and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up – the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled.’

    A suspicion that Kane might be, in essence, an extraordinary conjuring trick on Welles’s part persists as you reflect on the two life stories told in the film.   After the screening of the ‘News on the March’ memorial to Kane, two of the other men watching it remark, ‘Seventy years of a man’s life …’ and ‘That’s a lot to try to get into a newsreel’.  Yet Thompson has packed plenty of facts into the short; in a sense he’s told the story of Kane before Welles has chance to do so and it’s debatable how much more penetrating the ‘deeper’ biography really is.  Charles Foster Kane remains somehow a mystery at the end of the film as a whole.  This tantalising aspect also links with the film-making biography of Orson Welles – of a piece with the question of what The Magnificent Ambersons might have been if RKO hadn’t butchered it.   It’s one of the many things that ensure the enduring fascination of Citizen Kane.

    19 December 2018

    [1] See note on A Woman’s Face, released in the same month as Citizen Kane.

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