PRACTICALLY PERFECT IN EVERY WAY
Musically, Mary Poppins Returns falls short of original but Emily Blunt shines in title role.
Mary Poppins Returns
(out of 4) Starring Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, Dick Van Dyke, Angela Lansbury and David Warner. Written by David Magee. Directed by Rob Marshall. Opens Wednesday at theatres everywhere. 131 minutes. G Driving home from a preview screening of Mary Poppins Returns, I found myself whistling the tune “Chim Chim Cheree” from the first Mary Poppins movie.
Which just goes to show you the enduring magic of the initial creation, 54 years after author P.L. Travers’ magical nanny arrived on the big screen in the person of Julie Andrews.
It’s perhaps a bit too enduring for the late-blooming sequel, which stands smartly on its own merits yet can’t help but suffer from comparisons to an unsurpassable original, especially as regards the music (more on that in a moment).
This is not to say anything sour about Mary Poppins Returns; there’s more than a spoonful of sugar in this felicitous revisitation.
Disney and director Rob Marshall ( Chicago) have pulled out all the stops to make a very good holiday amusement, which is more brightly coloured than Santa’s workshop and which approaches brilliance in the casting of Emily Blunt in the title role.
An impossible task becomes entirely plausible in Blunt’s capable hands, even if her accent seems a tad too plummy to these ears: less of an approachable Mary and more of an aloof Her Majesty.
But Blunt is determined to make the role her own, even as she adopts such Poppins’ trademarks as that odd birdfooted pose Blunt strikes while flying across the rooftops of London.
Better known as a dramatic actress, Blunt’s singing and dancing come as a revelation.
She’s delightfully adroit at both, and if she doesn’t quite reach the original Mary’s multi-octave vocals (and who does?), she may well have Andrews beat in the hoofing department.
Blunt is “practically perfect in every way,” to quote the magical tape measure of you-know-who, yet she’s still a facsimile, no matter how charitable one chooses to be. She’s a jolly hologram of Mary, you might say, although your smileage may vary.
She fares better than Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has his own thankless task in the role of Jack, Mary’s earthbound friend. Jack’s a lamplighter, a charming one at that, and the multitalented Miranda was another obvious casting choice.
As good as he is, though, he can’t quite hold a candle to Mary’s original pal Bert, a chimney sweep and bon vivant whom Dick Van Dyke made into a classic London caricature, even with his dreadful Cockney accent. (Van Dyke has a wonderful cameo in the new film that makes for another clever tie-in to the original Mary Poppins, but do yourself a favour and don’t Google it before seeing it.)
Mary Poppins Returns is a true sequel, continuing the blend of live action and animation. The workmanlike screenplay by David Magee ( Life of Pi, Finding Neverland) picks up the story some 30 years after Mary’s first mysterious arrival into and abrupt departure from the lives of the Banks family of 17 Cherry Tree Lane. The Depression is on and the affluence of old is gone.
Parents George and Winnifred are out of the picture, leaving their grown-up children as imitations of their elders: sad-eyed Michael (Ben Whishaw) is now a banker like his father, exceedingly less skilled; ever-chipper Jane (Emily Mortimer) is a trade-union activist, lobbying for human rights that include and exceed the proto-feminist suffragette cause of her mother.
Michael is a recent widower with three young children (played by Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh and Joel Dawson) and amountain of unpaid debts. Still actively grieving the loss of his beloved wife, Michael is now in danger of losing the family home to the bank his father once toiled at, thanks to the unkind manoeuvrings of a money man played rather well by Colin Firth.
The time is ripe for Mary’s return, and return she does, with all the due praise rendered above. But now we must return to the issue of the music, which is the lead foot of this otherwise agile sequel.
There are a couple of decent tunes, but there’s little that comes close to the Oscar-winning work of (the) original tunesmiths
The songs by composer/lyricist Marc Shaiman and co-lyricist Scott Wittman are at best serviceable and at worst something quite atrocious — the latter including “Turning Turtle,” a ditty warbled by Meryl Streep as Mary’s dotty Eastern European cousin Topsy, in a sequence that weakly attempts to reconjure Ed Wynn’s “I Love to Laugh” daffiness from the 1964 original.
There are a couple of decent tunes, among them the show-stopping “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” and the musichall amusement “A Cover Is Not the Book,” but there’s little that comes close to the Oscar-winning work of original tunesmiths Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, even with surviving brother Richard acting as “musical consultant.”
Can you imagine a Mary Poppins movie without songs like “Chim Chim Cheree,” “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Jolly Holiday” and “Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)”?
You don’t have to, entirely, because the sequel’s score quotes from the familiar tunes of yore, which explains why I was whistling “Chim Chim Cher-ee” all the way home from the theatre.