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.