Smiles as Poppins serves up the sugar
GRIM: Charlie Hunnam as convict Henri Charrière in the remake of Papillon
the template of the 1964 classic film for the nostalgia-fuelled
Remember Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious Cockney accent as chimney sweep Bert? Now we have Lin-Manuel Miranda, the American creator and star of stage hit Hamilton, mangling his vowels as Bert’s equally chipper lamplighter son Jack.
Every sequence deliberately echoes one from the original. Instead of chimney sweeps dancing on the rooftops, we now have a troop of hoofing Cockneys pole-dancing on street lights.
The scene where Ed Wynn’s Uncle Albert took flight whenever he laughed has been replaced with Meryl Streep’s Cousin Topsy dancing on the ceiling as her house turns upside down.
Is this a loving homage or a dodgy retread? I suspect you’ll be too busy grinning and tapping your toes to care.
This beautifully-shot film opens with Jack lighting the gas lights in a gloomy London, singing a sweet ditty called Lovely London Sky. We’re in the Great Slump of the 1930s and as Jack reaches Cherry Tree Lane we learn that hard times have hit well-appointed, double-fronted number 17.
Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) is now a dopey artist with three children of his own (played by Nathanael Saleh, Pixie Davies and Joel Dawson). After his wife died earlier in the year, he took out a loan against the value of the family mansion.
But two men from Fidelity Fiduciary, the bank where his father worked, appear at the door with bad news. As Michael has forgotten to make his past three payments, he will lose his home unless he repays the loan in full within two weeks.
Luckily, he recalls that his father left him a pile of shares in the bank. Then he remembers he has lost the certificates.
What will he do? Organise a quick fire sale of his huge house in central London? Sack Julie Walters’s housekeeper and wash his own dishes? Move to a slightly smaller house in the suburbs? Or head to the attic to sing-speak a ballad lamenting the loss of his wife? No prizes for guessing the answer.
Just as you’re beginning to lose sympathy with this feckless painter, Emily Blunt floats down from the clouds with a talking umbrella. Her Poppins is a slightly different animal to Julie Andrews’s version. She’s sterner, posher but thankfully just as charming.
After ushering the children into the house with a quick “jiggety-jog”, she is reunited with Michael and his visiting sister Jane (Emily Mortimer).
The grown-up Banks children are shocked to see that their nanny doesn’t look like she’s aged a day in the past 30 years. In her absence, they convinced themselves that their childhood adventures were just the product of over-active imaginations.
Thankfully, director Rob Marshall summons up plenty of that old Disney magic. As Michael searches for the certificates and tangles with Colin Firth’s evil bank manager, Poppins takes charge of the children and we’re treated to a raft of wildly imaginative song and dance routines.
Highlights include a hallucinatory bath scene where they are transported to the bottom of the ocean and a trip to a cartoon musical hall filled with talking animals.
Here we get the film’s most memorable musical number. Blunt’s cut-glass accent transforms into convincing Cockney as she takes to the stage to perform A Cover Is
Not The Book, a witty song that’s laced with U-certificate grade innuendo. Perhaps
Mary Poppins Returns.
it’s the only song up there with Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and Spoonful Of Sugar but it convinced me that Blunt was practically perfect casting.
The actress had already shown great comic timing and here she brings genuine pizzazz to this joyous routine.
Will they be singing it 50 years from now? Probably not. But in the bleak midwinter of 2018, this warm trip down memory lane provides two hours of blissful escape.
Emily Blunt fits snugly into Julie Andrews’s sensible shoes but Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek rattle around in Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman’s footwear in a needless remake of the 1973 hit.
Hunnam plays Henri Charrière, a safecracker whom we meet in 1931 Paris as he’s framed for the murder of a pimp. He is sent to France’s brutal and corrupt prison colony in French Guiana where he forges an alliance with a weedy counterfeiter called Dega (Malek).
Papillon offers Dega a deal. He will protect him from the rapists and murderers if he agrees to fund his escape plan with banknotes secreted in what, I believe, modern-day lags would call his “prison wallet”.
Director Michael Noer based his film on Charrière’s disputed memoir where he detailed his superhuman powers of survival, steely resolve and ingenious escape plans.
This is a slightly grittier version than the 1973 film, the beatings from the sadistic prison guards are more graphic and the prison and the language are a lot fouler.
Hunnam brings a believable swagger to Charrière, nicknamed Papillon because of his butterfly tattoo. But if we are expected to watch criminals being tortured for more than two hours, we need a very good reason
Papillon,
to keep watching. Sadly, the relationship between the two men never takes flight as it did with McQueen and Hoffman.
Malek is still learning his trade as a screen actor but, as was also the case with his Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, he never finds a way to imbue Dega with an inner life.
This is supposed to be about a friendship put to the most extreme test imaginable but I never grasped what Charrière saw in Dega.
THE FACT that world-renowned choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has been elevated to co-director in the credits for suggests something about the film’s intended audience.
Preljocaj and Valérie Müller use a documentary style to lift the curtain on the world of the professional dancer from the bleeding feet and brutal auditions to the seemingly effortless performances.
We meet Polina as an eight-year-old Russian waif (Veronika Zhovnytska) who wants to become a star ballerina to please her poor father who is in hock to local gangsters.
After surviving for years under the iron rule of her teacher (Aleksei Guskov), the teenage Polina (now played by dancer Anastasia Shevtsova) wins an audition at the Bolshoi.
But after passing the most competitive audition in dance, she throws it all away to move to France to join the company of a famous modern dance choreographer played by Juliette Binoche.
The long dance sequences are beautiful but the drama felt a little dry. This one is strictly for the dance enthusiast.
Polina