It feels like every character is bounding out of the screen asking you, Do you feel that child-like sense of wonder yet? Well, DO you?
Whether or not you’ve watched the 1964 Mary Poppins, it’s likely you’ve unknowingly absorbed most of it. There are films you effectively watch without ever actually watching them—you probably think you’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life, but it’s likely you’ve just seen most of it over the years as it whizzed by over the Christmas season. Culture at large, at least in some parts of the world, is rife with references to bits and pieces of Mary Poppins and that is, depending on how you feel about the movie, either annoying or really Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Mary Poppins Returns is unlikely to become an iconic cultural artefact of similar proportions. Released this past Christmas season, it’s billed as a sequel because it follows the Banks children, Michael and Jane, as they struggle with adult problems thirty years after Mary Poppins entered and then left their lives. It’s now the 1930s, women can wear trousers and vote, Jane has a job that involves labour activism, and there’s a new Cockney lamplighter, Jack, on the street. If Mary Poppins was underscored by the blatant sexism of George Banks, this film rests upon Michael’s all-consuming grief over his wife’s death. Michael now lives in the family house with his three children and Jane, who has her own flat in the city, helps him raise the family, along with their housekeeper Ellen. Looming over them all is the threat of the bank taking over the beloved house. There was a loan, and it needs to be paid off by Friday, and there are shares left to Michael and Jane by their father which could save the day but they’re nowhere to be found (relax: of course they’re found by movie’s end, happiness reigns, and the house returns to the Bankses).
But the fact that it’s set twenty-five years after the events of the first film doesn’t mean it’s a sequel. Sure, Mary Poppins returns and the children are grown, but this version is really a reboot masquerading as a sequel. It’s filled with so many nods and winks to the original that watching it becomes a game: how many references and similarities to the original can you spot?
Plenty, it turns out, including the cartoon sequence involving penguins and other animals, but this time with none of the crispness and sparkle of the original. Here, the animation is wishy-washy and carelessly done, like an afterthought. And—I say this as someone who, like millions, surely, adores the penguins in the original—these couldn’t hold a tiny tuxedo to their predecessors. The songs echo those in the 1964 version, down to “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” which is filmed in much the same style as “Step in Time” but with none of that number’s electricity and weirdly haunting beauty. And of course there are the iconic bits, like Poppins looking at her reflection in the mirror or the talking umbrella handle.
But none of it works particularly well, because Mary Poppins Returns has none of the exuberant eccentricity of the original. The original was, yes, a meticulously made Disney movie but it has a way of bursting out of its seams, with a general sense of “Can you believe we’re doing this?” Hence, I emphasise again, those adorable penguins whose cuteness spills all around Mary, Bert, and the children. Or the foxhunt sequence, or the carousel, and so on.
It’s no doubt difficult to follow a film like Mary Poppins without fear of bungling it—which, perhaps, is why it took fifty-four years to make this “sequel” because, really, who wants to follow that act? The problem here is that the version—and it is a version, not a sequel—is so heavyhanded in pointing out how cute and adorable all of it is, which only makes it much less so. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like, to be a child,” a balloon lady (played by the inimitable Angela Lansbury) admonishes Michael. That line is a cliché, a classic Disney marketing line, and something that could just as well appear in pamphlets for Disney World. Similarly, Michael’s daughter Annabel smugly intones, “Nothing is impossible,” because, you see, from the mouths of babes, and so on. Here again, we might note a crucial difference in the two films: the children in the original were slightly bratty and more often concerned with their own well-being than with others; their progression from brattiness to deep anxiety about their father was a crucial part of the plot. In Mary Poppins Returns, Annabel is practically an adult in a child’s body, taking care of the household with a world-weariness that is played for effect, and her brothers, well, who knows? I couldn’t tell you what made them different from each other.
Films directed at children are particularly difficult to get quite right: they have to please children without talking down to them, and they have to convince adults that they’re worth potentially multiple watchings. Mary Poppins Returns isn’t so much condescending as soulless. Everyone smiles too much, is much too smug about how lovely they’re being, and the musical style, which derives too much from the older film, sounds derivative and tinny for a film made in 2018 and hopelessly strained. Take, for instance, the last song, “Nowhere to Go But Up” (a nod to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”) which comes at the very end, but which feels like a false conclusion (and drags the film out). It’s minutes and minutes of enforced joy and cheap lyrics about balloons and happiness. Just as you think, Oh, good, the last balloon, so now this will all end, it starts up again and leaves you crying for the credits to roll.
And then, of course, somewhere in there is Meryl Streep, brought in to provide, well, something, a Meryl-Streepness of sorts, as Topsy, Mary Poppins’ cousin, under an orange wig and dark eyeliner. In Streep’s hands, Topsy is floridly played, as is her wont: everything about the performance says, Look at me! This great Oscar-winner, daring to take on this silly, small cameo in an utterly delightful film! Ain’t I a sport! Streep’s presence in any film spells doom, a sure sign that a director is desperately hoping that her presence will somehow distract from the lack of, say, a decent plot or dialogue, that viewers might somehow mistake even a small appearance by her as a sign of the quality of the larger production.
She hams it up, but it’s with artifice disguised as quirkiness and not in the way that, say, Dick Van Dyke does, who’s clearly enjoying the sly reference to the fact that, fifty-four years ago, he played both a youthful chimney-sweep and an aging banker. His dance sequence is one of the best in the film and sadly much too short, reminding us of the gloriousness of his footwork in Mary Poppins.
Mary Poppins wasn’t some quirky little film that miraculously became a success—it was very much a massive studio production by one of the most ruthless and cutthroat film companies to have existed. But it worked, spectacularly, and has endured: It’s as popular as it is because adults can still stand to watch it alongside the children in their charge and successive generations keep introducing it to the next. I suspect that much of the relatively modest success of Mary Poppins Returns was due to adults who remember and still watch the original with the children in their lives, and who were curious to see what a sequel might look like.
Mary Poppins Returns wants desperately to be revered as an iconic film of its time. But that kind of status only comes about by an alchemical combination of cunning and haphazardness that is always, always hard to predict, no matter how many millions are poured into a production (for every Aquaman, there’s a Ben-Hur). Some of the updates are refreshing, sure—there are people of colour in it, and a friend assures me he saw a gay couple. We can forgive such anachronistic touches (out gay men and people of colour working as bankers in 1930s London?) in a film whose main character is, after all, a woman who flies around with a talking umbrella. But none of that rescues the film from its stiffness and its by-the-numbers approach to creating a cotton-candy sweetness that never sits right. It feels prescriptive in its constant reminder that it’s giving you, to echo another cliché, “a child-like sense of wonder.” Most of the time, it feels like every character is bounding out of the screen asking you, Do you feel that child-like sense of wonder yet? Well, DO you?
Watching it, it’s impossible to escape a creeping sense that Mary Poppins Returns is a movie made by committee and passed through multiple focus groups. Most movies are, actually (which is why trailers often have bits that never appear in final versions). But the successful ones manage to eventually move beyond hollow acquiescence to market forces and forge at least a reasonable simulation of sincerity. It’s one thing to reference the original—sequels often must, even in scant ways. But Mary Poppins Returns isn’t a sequel as much as it is a marketing ploy, an attempt to reap the success of Mary Poppins without offering much that’s new.
Many thanks to Matt Simonette, for watching and discussing the film with me, and who made the point about anachronisms.
For more Film Reviews, see also:
Jason Momoa, Aquaman, and the Queer Art of Friendship
Joshua Marston’s Complete Unknown: Or, When Critics Respond to a Woman Who Lives Like a Man
Steven Spielberg’s The BFG and the AMM
Mr. Holmes and the Case of the Aging Sleuth
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Image: Hegel’s Holiday, René Magritte, 1958