(IMAGE: WALT DISNEY PICTURES)
Walt Disney Pictures. 2018. Musical. 130 minutes.
RATING: 2 angels
Mary Poppins was already a landmark film when it was released in October of 1964. Adapted from the popular children’s books by Australian-born British author P.L. Travers, it represented a personal crusade for Walt Disney, whose daughters were so enamored of Travers’ creation that he spared no effort to persuade the temperamental writer to accord him the film rights. The resulting picture, directed by journeyman director Robert Stevenson (Jane Eyre) and featuring songs by the trusted in-house sibling team of Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman, would go on to become Disney’s most successful ever commercial and critical achievement, ranking third among the year’s top grossers behind only Goldfinger and My Fair Lady. Shortly after, it landed a near record thirteen Oscar nominations – the most of any film that year. Though Warner Bros.’ My Fair Lady would predictably take home the top prize, the Best Actress award given to newcomer and Broadway transplant Julie Andrews for her incarnation of Travers’ mystical, “practically perfect” English nanny sent Hollywood studios a stern message from its creative community. It was no secret that Andrews, who had soared to stardom as Eliza Dolittle in the original 1956 stage production of My Fair Lady, was dropped from the Warner film in favor of established star Audrey Hepburn. Walt Disney, ever the risk taker that Jack Warner was not, seized on the oversight, cast Andrews in her first feature film… and history was made.
Neither is it a stretch to argue that but for Disney’s decision to elevate Andrews to instant stardom, the following year’s even more historic global juggernaut, the similarly-themed The Sound of Music, might never have happened. Though her performance as Maria did not garner her a second Academy Award, The Sound of Music won nearly everything else, giving Andrews the very thing that had been denied her the previous year: the dual prize of box office and Academy Award champion. Even sweeter was the added triumph of besting Gone with the Wind’s twenty-six year-old box office record and the less obvious cherry of sharing the screen with Audrey Hepburn’s My Fair Lady voice-double Marni Nixon in her only on-screen appearance as Sister Sophia.
As with most of Walt’s movie triumphs, Mary Poppins has not only grown in popularity over the years, but subsumed its literary source material to where it is now regarded as a primarily Disney property, perhaps even the most quintessentially Disney property in existence. That, plus the seven other Poppins books written by Travers between 1934 and 1988, rendered it a foregone conclusion that Disney’s current strategy of reviving classic properties would eventually come back around to Mary Poppins. Despite lackluster box office, the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks — a romanticized look at Disney’s efforts to court Travers for the movie rights starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson — was a clear and largely successful shot across the bow to evaluate present-day audience awareness of, and potential receptivity toward, a journey back to Cherry Tree Lane.
I offer this lengthy prologue to underscore the magnitude of the shadow into which Mary Poppins Returns emerges in 2018. It is not insignificant that the original Mary Poppins was released fifty-four years after the era it depicts whereas Mary Poppins Returns arrives fifty-four years after Mary Poppins. The makers of the first film were deeply connected to the period they were referencing. The makers of the new film are connected to nothing but the current studio regime’s mandate to mine its catalog for reboots, remakes, sequels and any other form of exploitation that reinforces the brand and rejuvenates a stalled revenue stream. Lest there be any doubt this is what Disney had in mind, just stroll into a Disney Store or theme park boutique and behold the unprecedented explosion of Mary Poppins merchandise the likes of which hasn’t been seen… ever. At least Saving Mr. Banks understood Travers’ core message and celebrated it accordingly. Mary Poppins Returns somehow manages to so gleefully betray its predecessor, it’s hard to tell whether it’s out of malice, greed or just plain incompetence. Not that it much matters, for Mary Poppins Returns is neither a sequel nor a reboot, but an evil twin, a proverbial changeling designed to fool a new generation of filmgoers into thinking it’s the real thing based only on the most superficial of affections for the original film’s aesthetic while betraying its moral foundation.
Set roughly two decades after the events of Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Returns finds the candy-colored hues of 1910 London replaced by the drab and foggy grays more generically associated with the London of the Blitz. It’s Cherry Tree Lane, all right, but it’s hardly the stuff of childhood memories. Perhaps that’s the point — the city is said to be suffering from some kind of economic downturn — but even then, it serves the story poorly. The plot is largely a plodding and intentional retread of the original, minus the charm and whimsy. Now grown, Jane and Michael Banks (Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw) have long since abandoned the magic of their Childhood adventures. Worse, they no longer believe anything magical actually happened — it was just their imagination, wasn’t it? It’s as if nothing from Mary Poppins’ first visit actually took. Michael, now a widower with three children of his own, works for the same Fidelity Fiduciary Bank as his father, but with less financial security thanks to the expense of his late wife’s illness which forced him to borrow against the house. Adding insult to injury, his very own employer is now threatening to repossess the home if the family cannot come up with the outstanding lump sum by the usual arbitrary movie deadline.
Sensing an urgent and renewed need for her unique skillset, Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) descends from the heavens to once more set things right in the Banks household. It is arguably the movie’s lone high point — owing perhaps more to pent-up nostalgia than actual drama — because it’s precipitously downhill from there. Blunt’s noble efforts are hard to slight — she is, after all, inviting comparisons to one of the most beloved movie stars and memorable singing voices in history. That she’s not up to the task is to be expected — no one else would have fared any better. What’s so supremely disappointing is that everything else in the film is equally lackluster and derivative. In place of Dick Van Dyke’s streetwise Cockney chimneysweep Bert there is now Lin-Manuel Miranda’s streetwise Cockney lamplighter Jack… Bert’s old apprentice. With Michael Banks having morphed into his own father, and Jane having morphed into her mother — now marching for labor rights as her mother marched for women’s suffrage — it’s Michael’s three children (Pixie Davis, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson ) who become Mary Poppins’ charges. Things in the neighborhood are much the same as well — Ellen (Julie Walters) is still the Banks’ housekeeper and Admiral Boom (David Warner) and Mr. Binnacle (Jim Norton) are still manning the cannon every hour, on the hour — albeit with slightly less accuracy than before, a ridiculous setup for an equally ridiculous payoff down the line. As to the adventures which Mary concocts for the children, there’s no question that audiences will be at least superficially entertained. Digital effects are utilized to maximum effect, and director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods, Nine) somewhat makes up for his typically ham-fisted staging with some genuinely inventive choreography (though it occasionally feels like Bob Fosse as channeled by Michael Kidd — or vice versa). At the same time, no one — least of all children — are going to miss the fact that every scene, every adventure, every song has been carefully constructed to mirror a counterpart in Mary Poppins. Songwriting veterans Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray) have certainly given it their all as well, with a host of catchy tunes worthy of Broadway, but given the constraints of essentially mirroring the musical beats of the earlier, better movie, they wind up facing the same fate as Blunt, falling short of an impossible bar originally set by the Sherman Brothers. It bears underlining, however, that the real problem isn’t that Mary Poppins Returns is derivative — it’s that it’s derivative in a way that actually manages to be contemptuous of its predecessor — like a mockingbird squawking mangled and meaningless repetitions. What at first feels cowardly soon devolves into shamelessness before finally reaching the level of infuriating when we get Meryl Streep for Ed Wynn and lamplighters dancing in the sewer instead of chimneysweeps dancing on rooftops.
Unfortunately, the single most treacherous part of Mary Poppins Returns would constitute the mother of all spoilers if revealed here — so I will only say that it literally retcons the entire plot and most crucial message of Mary Poppins out of existence and replaces it with precisely the kind of phony MacGuffinized resolution that Disney has made obligatory for all of its branded franchises, from Marvel to Pixar to Lucasfilm. It is clearly no oversight that the only song and sequence from Mary Poppins not to receive a hideously mutilated doppelgänger here is “Feed the Birds.” That’s because Mary Poppins Returns isn’t really about life lessons and priorities and family. It’s a caper movie about a family’s race to save their house from repossession. It’s that rather fatuous contrivance, revealed right at the outset, that throws up the first red flag, for a very large part of what has made Mary Poppins such an enduring family classic is precisely its defiance of formula. There is no villain, no urgent crisis demanding timely resolution, no assemblage of sly subplots designed to conveniently coalesce and ripen precisely at some richly foreshadowed denouement — in point of fact, there isn’t much of a denouement, either. Beguiling in its simplicity, Mary Poppins is really little more than a somewhat disjointed collection of magical childhood adventures the express purpose of which is the healing of a family whose father has lost sight of the emotional needs of his children. It was the story of Travers’ own childhood — and it resonated with Disney, himself a father of two young daughters. Mary Poppins Returns, by contrast, merely borrows the first film’s general sequence of events only to bullishly superimpose it with a dutiful slog through the syllabus of Screenwriting 101. Beyond all the coy winks and vapid ventriloquism, Mary Poppins Returns is a bit of a badger — Mr. Dawes Jr., who assumed his father’s position at the head of Fidelity Fiduciary, has been sidelined for health reasons, leaving the bank in the hands of William “Weatherall” Wilkins (Colin Firth), a villainous schemer whose elaborate plot to rob the Banks of their home is so pointlessly preposterous, it may as well have been cribbed from an old Keystone comedy. Firth’s performance is vintage Ford Sterling, minus only the top hat and twirled mustache.
The calculation here is as mercenary as they come, and it’s hardly the fault of screenwriter David Magee (Finding Neverland, Life of Pi) who is simply coloring in the lines of the coloring book furnished by Disney. For present-day audiences weened on a steady diet of action and genre films, a simple, innocent musical of yore is no longer sufficient to entertain — villains, dastardly plots, chase scenes and action set pieces must be shoehorned into all mainstream movies, whether they logically belong or not. At the same time, audience expectations obligate some degree of faithfulness to the original. Never mind that the two imperatives are so diametrically opposed as to be farcical — from a studio standpoint, genre mashups are marketing gold — a chance to broaden immediate demographic appeal and pack the suckers in before they realize they’ve been had. Exactly how quickly audiences will figure that out, one can only guess — but if my five-year-old daughter, for whom Mary Poppins is cinematic scripture, is any indication, it won’t take long. When asked, immediately after, which of the two films she preferred, she was unequivocal: “The original. They shouldn’t have made the kids grow up.”
Wise words from a child. Disney should take note.