A FIRST-CLASS RETURN FOR Paddington
Beautifully constructed, deliciously performed and with a brilliant, self-mocking turn from Hugh Grant as (ahem) a washed-up actor. It’s...
Three years ago, Paddington – the first-ever live-action feature film about the small, marmalade-loving, duffel-coat-wearing bear from darkest Peru – was almost as much a relief as it was a delight. For those of us who’d grown up with A Bear Called Paddington and the many books by Michael Bond that followed, the discovery that Paddington was still very much, well, Paddington, even if he was now up on the big screen in all his furry glory, was the most welcome of surprises. Those sharp-suited filmmaking folk really hadn’t spoiled our beloved bear at all.
Well, the good news is that Paddington 2 is even better. From the dramatic opening flashback explaining how Paddington came to be adopted by Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo to the moving final caption – ‘for our friend, Michael’ – quietly reminding us that Paddington’s creator died in June at the age of 91 – the film is a beautifully constructed, deliciously acted joy.
Ben Whishaw is so good as the voice of the resourceful, clumsy but always impeccably polite young bear that they might have to invent an awards category just for him. Elsewhere, Brendan Gleeson is a deadpan hoot as the threatening prison cook Knuckles McGinty, while Hugh Grant gives one of the best performances of his career as the film’s scheming baddie, Phoenix Buchanan.
OK, so he’s playing a vain, washed-up old actor whose glory days are behind him – not exactly a stretch, his knockers will say – but the self-mocking execution is both endearingly game and surely nomination-grabbingly good. Giving a performance touched with just the right amount of actorly camp, Grant sings, demonstrates his lifelong talent for accents and even breaks into a ‘big number’ songand-dance routine as the final credits roll. Oh, and in a role where he has almost as many costume changes as Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts And Coronets, he also plays a nun. But Grant’s is a supporting role because the film’s real star, of course, is Paddington, a bear now thoroughly at home with the Brown family in Windsor Gardens (Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins return as Mr and Mrs Brown, while Julie Walters is their feisty housekeeper, Mrs Bird) and on the best, hat-raising, lift-cadging terms with many of the residents of the rather smart area of west London (a convincing blend of Notting Hill and Little Venice) in which he lives. And it is on one of his regular visits to the Portobello Road antiques shop owned by his friend Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent) that our story gets properly under way. Paddington is looking for a suitable present to mark Aunt Lucy’s 100th birthday and an old pop-up book (sweetly, Mr Gruber refers to it as a popping book, the sort of mistake any child could make) of London landmarks seems perfect. The book is expensive and Paddington will have to get a job to afford it (cue much messy silliness as he becomes first a barber’s assistant and then a window-
cleaner), but he knows Aunt Lucy will love it. And then a burglar steals the book, Paddington becomes the chief suspect and we’re off.
It’s also about now that the real filmmaking magic begins because Paddington 2 is so much more than a live-action film, with clever visual effects and animatronics. Transported by the book, Paddington briefly plunges us into a new, stylised world that feels like the best Pollock’s theatre production you’ve ever seen. Goodness knows what children will make of it but their parents – at least if they ever played with a model theatre – will love it. Later, a dream sequence that sees Paddington returning to the Peruvian jungle proves similarly moving.
Once again directed and co-written by Paul King, the film’s deceptive genius is not just a renewed faithfulness to the spirit of Bond’s books but the clever way it is set in the present day and yet constantly harks back to the more innocent times when the stories were written.
So when the by-now teenage Judy Brown (Madeleine Harris) sets up a newspaper, she does so with an old hand-operated printing press. Similarly, her brother Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) may pass himself off as an aspiring rapper but his secret passion is steam trains. And at times of crisis, look out for how everyone resorts to the traditional red telephone box, even if they are now derelict and neglected. It’s a small, almost throwaway detail but – like so much on show here – totally delicious.
Like the first Paddington, the film bears a PG certificate but for me the sense of threat is significantly and sensibly reduced. The joyful end result should delight children and leave their parents in a state that is one part warm nostalgic glow, one part sniffling lachrymose puddle. Wonderful.
The phenomenal success of Wonder Woman lends timeliness to Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (15) the story of how the first female comic-book superhero came to be written. Back in late 1920s New England, William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) was teaching psychology at then all-female Radcliffe College.
He and his wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), both fall in love with a student. Can their ménage à trois live happily ever after? All the performances are good but Hall’s is outstanding, in a film that always remains highly watchable.
If you were a grieving elderly widow, missing your late husband, wouldn’t you warm to a computer programme that brought him back to life? Michael