Mary Poppins Returns

Mary Poppins was and still is one of the greatest Disney films ever made. With its enchanting atmosphere, iconic characters, fantastic music and visuals, and mature themes underneath its quaint premise about a magical nanny coming to assist a struggling family, the 1964 musical was Disney’s highest grossing film at the time and dominated the Academy Awards by receiving 13 nominations and took home five. It’s a staple of the brand and is still deserving of its prestige. With this in mind, the idea of trying to remake the film over half a century later under the guise of apparently being a sequel is one of the silliest ideas the company has ever had (and that’s saying a lot). Loosely based on the remaining seven books in the series written by author, P. L Travers, it has been 25 years since the events of the first film, and Jane and Michael Banks (played by Emily Mortimer and Ben Winshaw) have now grown up to fill similar roles that their parents share all those years ago (get used to that). Michael is a single father of three children, Anabel, John, and Georgie (played by Pixie Davies, Nathaniel Saleh, and Joel Dawson) and are facing some troubling times as their mother has recently passed away, and Michael is at risk of losing his childhood home to the new bank manager, William “Weatherall” Wilkins (played by Colin Firth). Trying to find a solution their troubles, the kids accidentally bump into Mary Poppins (played this time by Emily Blunt) who once again comes to watch over the Banks children. Although Michael has seemingly lost a good chunk of his childhood innocence due to the stress of living and losing a wife, Mary Poppins manages to connect with the new Banks children with the help of a lamplighter named Jack (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda) and tries to see if there’s a chance to save the Banks’ homes from being stolen away from them. Mary Poppins Returns doesn’t feel like a continuation but instead a revamped remake with slight add-ons, which leaves it without its own identity and results in this film constantly battling against its predecessor and failing to recapture any of the original’s magic, charm, and maturity. Though feeling very unoriginal, underwhelming, amazingly rehashed and completely alien to the original, the film has some likeable actors, pretty looking effects, and a tiny bit of heart that makes it flawed, but not awful in spirit.

The sad thing is that there is a decent idea behind a Mary Poppins sequel. There was supposed to be one made right after the original film, but conflicts with P. L. Travers prevented Disney from making one right out and script issues between the both of them kept being created yet never coming to fruition (even one that involved Michael Jackson disturbingly). The film has pieces in the script written by David Magee (along with help from John DeLuca and director, Rob Marshall) that could work as a sequel involving the grown-up Banks children and Mary Poppins returning to save them rather than the kids (which in a sense was what the original film was about), but it doesn’t try to tell its own story, but rather forcibly retell the same narrative with the same steps, beats and actions.  You can quite literally count and pinpoint every single time they recreate a scene from the original film and since it doesn’t try hard enough to differentiate itself from its previous, you can’t ignore the blatant retreding. Even taking out how much is essentially being retold with a new coat of paint, the new elements aren’t explored enough to leave a noticeable impression and whatever current elements are included into what’s essentially a retelling of the original, actively make the story less distinct and more atypical for a family movie. Mary Poppins was presented as a whimsical kid’s flick but had a maturity to its writing and performances that made it relatable to as many adults as it did to kids (maybe even to some extent more) and this one lacks that grounded nature and its swapped out for cliched bad guys and action sequences, which don’t belong in this kind of story. Marshall has proved he was capable of directing a musical through his work on Chicago, but the film overall is massively dull, has a sprinkle of the magical feel but not enough to feel actively engaging, and contains a stage-play quality rather than a theatrical sense, which becomes an issue whenever a song sequence is showcased.

Much like most of the story, most of the characters feel like replicas of past characters and some have evolved to overtake different roles. Michael for example, starts off as his own character going through his own grief and feels like an off shoot of the original Mr Banks, but as the film continues and goes down a particular route, he just devolves into Mr Banks without any differences and without proper context. With that said, while the roles aren’t very strong and lack solid direction, the actors are putting in effort all throughout and result in some fun performances. Arguably the person who had the most to overcome with Emily Blunt, who had such big shoes to film by portraying a character as famous and iconic as Mary Poppins, and for the most part, she does a pretty good job. She captures the look, voice, and attitude of the role quite well and it doesn’t feel like an exact copy of Julie Andrews, she is allowed to bring her own energy to it, and it works out in the long run. It isn’t all spot-on however as whether due to bad direction or something similar, certain moments where she has to be positive and passionate don’t work very well and feel like a performance rather than coming off natural. This is only a section of the performance as she does do half of it pretty well, especially the singing and softer moments, are done very well, so it doesn’t feel like a fault on her acting. Lin Manuel Miranda does a nice enough job in the Bert-like role even if it is impossible to think of him as anything other than Bert 2.0, all the kids as actors are passable enough, but they’re so bland and have so little purpose in this story that they barely leave an impression whatsoever, Colin Firth is stuck with an awfully generic villain role in a story that doesn’t require a villain, which results in all of his scenes feeling out-of-place, poorly written and just bad all around, and Meryl Streep has a pretty generic role and she does nothing special with it, but it’s not too bad. The best people in this movie are easily Ben Whishaw as Michael and Emily Mortimer as Jane. These two have already proven to be very good actors in other roles, and here is no different, taking essentially basic parts and bringing a lot of charm, likability, and relatability to their parts. It feels so natural, authentic, and genuine that any time these two are on screen, it’s a pretty engaging movie.

Being a sequel to Mary Poppins, music is a big component and bizarrely, the film handles this component well and not so well at the same time. On the one hand, most of the song numbers written by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman are pretty great and well handled; they’re nicely sung, have good lyrics, bouncy melodies and brighten up the film quite a bit by at least injecting a sense of kinetic energy and color into a stale and often times lifeless production. On the other hand, they are strangely forgettable and don’t stay in your memory once you’ve passed the scene they were in, the choreography for them is surprisingly bland and more like something out of a stage show than a cinematic musical, and because of the trajectory of the film, they just feel like alterations of the original’s films music rather than their own unique songs. The effects though not very good from a technical perspective, are still pretty to look at and have that traditional feel to some of them that is appreciated in certain parts. The CG is overwhelming and sometimes overused, but very visually bizarre and colorful. The entire movie is decently colorful in parts with elements like the costume design by Sandy Powell and even the production design by John Myhre and set decoration by Gordon Sim capturing the appropriate style of the time period while still popping with vibrancy and lighting when it needs to get more creative and magical. The 2D animation is very well done and look very impressive, especially blending with live-action and while it does just feel like a re-do of the chalk art scene from the first film it is nice to see a big-budget movie have a fully hand-drawn animated sequence. It does spend a little too much time in this specific portion and it even ends with a painfully forced-in action scene, but overall, the spectacle is still very impressive.

The film has some much going against it, being a ‘’sequel’’ to Mary Poppins, coming out years later, not having Julie Andrews (which she chose to do as she wanted it to be an ”Emily” picture, which is nice at least, but still bizarre that she wanted nothing to do with it), and failing to recapture the same magic as the original film even though all its doing is trying to recapture the same magic, and while the film does very little to defend itself against some of these faults, it is, at the end of the day, not the worst film Disney’s released. The mimicry of the old film mixed with the lazy cliches inserted in as ”new features” are frustrating, and forgettable music, forced conflicts with cartoonish villains, and stale script don’t improve things much, but it still has some good acting, nice-looking visuals, and a tiny bit of heart to make it not an awful sitting. The magic is toned down in this film, but nothing can truly kill a picture when Mary Poppins has something to do with it. A bitter medicine overall, but a little bit of its sugar made it easier to swallow.