State of quantum nostalgia
● ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ practically perfect in every way
(10) Mary Poppins Returns Directed by: Rob Marshall Starring: Emily Blunt, Lin Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer
If I don’t say it, another critic will: Mary Poppins Returns really is practically perfect in every way. Walt Disney Pictures clearly realise the legacy of their beloved 1964 musical adaptation of PL Travers’s Mary Poppins stories is not to be trifled with.
So rather than carrying on the story in the ordinary sense, the studio has taken the same approach they did with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, crafting a follow-up that exists in what I can only describe as a state of quantum nostalgia – a simultaneous sequel and remake that had me on the verge of blubbing for its entire twohour running time, for what felt like five different reasons at once.
For the most part, Rob Marshall’s film hews painstakingly close to the original in style and structure. But it comes to life thanks to its own consummate artistry and rafter-rattling gusto – watching it feels like reliving a classic, rather than merely retreading it.
For some, this might smack of pointlessness, or even cynicism: since the first Mary Poppins already exists, why make another one that tries to reconjure the same old magic?
But the point is that vanishingly few films these days are even working from the same spell book: the list begins and ends with Paddington and The Muppets. Mary Poppins Returns blows the dust off its cover, heaves it open, and lets rip.
Everyone involved has a pin-sharp understanding of its predecessor’s greatness, starting with Emily Blunt, who is a dream in Julie Andrews’s shoes.
This Mary is a little sharper, a little snippier, a little meaner on the sugar-to-medicine ratio than her forerunner – but still a force of love and goodness from the moment she descends on the string of a certain kite, as the Banks family once again finds itself in crisis.
It is the 1930s, with Britain sunk in the Great Slump, and Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) – now fully grown, and a harried father of three himself – is scrambling to make ends meet.
Recently widowed, Michael has taken out a loan against the value of 17 Cherry Tree Lane – and with only five days left to repay it before the house is repossessed by grasping Mr Wilkins (Colin Firth) at the Fidelity Fiduciary, he and his children are counting on a miracle.
But miracles are a Poppins stock-in-trade, and after a jolting reunion with Michael and his sister Jane (Emily Mortimer), which reveals they have long since dismissed their own childhood adventures as the products of overactive imaginations, it again falls to the nanny to whip both generations of Bankses into shape.
Mary’s jolly sidekick this time is lamplighter Jack – a former apprentice of Dick van Dyke’s chimney sweep Bert, played with nuclear-grade dazzle and showmanship by Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Van Dyke himself returns for a bring-the-house-down cameo.)
It’s not quite clear if Miranda is struggling with his Cockney accent out of deep-seated respect or because he just can’t do one.
Nevertheless, it feels entirely right, and the diligence with which the film hits such crowd-pleasing notes allows the cast and crew to add their own spins elsewhere.
Marshall and his co-choreographer John DeLuca allow themselves a slinky, shuffling, Fosse-esque routine during the lamplighters’ ensemble showstopper, Trip a Little Light Fantastic, while Miranda’s own flair for patter songs comes to the fore in A Cover is Not the Book – the climax of a handanimated music hall sequence that has the oh-my-goodness-are-you-actually-seeing-this factor on which repeat ticket sales are built.
Both of the above numbers are clearly designed to correspond with two of the bestloved old ones – Step in Time and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – and the same holds for many others.
Can You Imagine That is a water-ballet reimagining of A Spoonful of Sugar; The Place Where Lost Things Go a five-hankie heartbreaker on a par with Feed the Birds; Turning Turtle a new I Love To Laugh,
liberally spritzed with L’Air du Streep.
The songs themselves, written by the Hairspray duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are all unqualified knock-outs, with all the infectious breeziness and soaring orchestration of the Sherman brothers originals.
When the melody from Can You Imagine That glides in on an oboe during the opening scenes, I was convinced it was a new arrangement of a theme I’d forgotten from the original. There is no higher compliment that can be paid to Shaiman and Wittman’s work than that.
Hence the Force Awakens comparison, which I don’t deploy lightly: the nostalgia here is foundational; stitched into the fabric. For instance: did you know how much of the Mary Poppins “feel” is thanks to the work of the great Disney background painter Peter Ellenshaw?
Marshall and his team certainly do, and work his rosyripe, impressionistic visual style into both the new computergenerated backdrops and the series of London landscapes that play beneath the film’s opening credits. Whether you get the reference or not is immaterial: the effect is all that matters, and it left me mistyeyed and codfish-mouthed.
‘A simultaneous sequel and remake that had me on the verge of blubbing for its entire two-hour running time’