While scrolling Facebook a year ago, I saw a post that asked, “Did Mary Poppins go to Hogwarts?” After exactly one second of reflection, I “liked” it and then felt deeply compelled to comment: “Duh?”
I mean, it’s just obvious. The Brits and their magical stuff, all those horcrux-y things they have. Like Excalibur. And the ceremonial mace (A King Charles II horcrux, apparently) that, by its mere presence, ensures that things run smoothly in the house of Parliament until, like recently, someone scandalously tries to run out of the building with it. Which is an extremely Monty Python thing to do. And then of course, there’s Tolkien’s One Ring, which is a dark-lord horcrux. And then there’s the other dark lord, Voldemort’s horcruxes.
And so Mary Poppins’s flying parrot umbrella that talks? That’s a disguised Hogwarts magic wand if I ever saw one. What else would it be? Merry England is very magical.
The Banks nanny job was probably Mary’s first gig out of Hogwarts, so since the movie came out in 1964, that would make her Hogwarts class of ‘63. Oh wait—the whole story took place early in the last century. Hmm ... class of 1913, maybe? Well, no matter. She never ages anyway.
Is ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ a Magical Movie?
Let me come back to saying whether there’s magic. Actually, I better get it over with right now: Using the words of Monty Python’s “Did you dress up this witch?” scene, if you ask me whether “Mary Poppins Returns” is magical, I will say … “No. Yes. A bit, a bit.”Young Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) is all grown up now, his parents long gone, and he’s recently widowed with three young mouths to feed, and in a shaky state of employment. That’s depressing too.
Even more depressing is the fact that Michael, like Disney’s recent, all-grown-up Christopher Robin, who thought Pooh and Piglet were figments of his childhood imagination, is now similarly under the impression that Mary Poppins’s magical mystery tour of their childhood home was largely rubbish.
Sister Jane Banks (Emily Mortimer) is a single, social-justice warrior fighting for labor rights. And Dick Van Dyke’s iconic chimney sweep Bert is also long gone, but his apprentice Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) tries to fill Bert’s big shoes, and his feet are way too small.
Ultimately, Blunt is like a splendid Christmas turkey surrounded by a crumb of stuffing and a tiny speck of cranberry sauce—her supporting cast. Mary Poppins arrives to do the magical nanny things we want to see: sliding up banisters and preparing bubble baths that open into other dimensions where there’s Caribbean snorkeling; singing musical numbers; and being prim, proper, tremendously and excellently elocution-ally British, while being demurely coquettish and as self-confident as only a Hogwarts graduate with supernormal abilities can be.
Again, Is It a Magical Movie?
The first “Mary Poppins” definitely was. Pure classic. First movie I ever saw. And let me tell you, in Montessori kindergarten, you were not cool if you couldn’t say “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”Now, there’s been much cynical sniping about Disney exhuming its treasure chest of children’s classics and attempting to update and squeeze more money out of them.
Need there be cynicism? It’s show business after all; Disney is in the business of show—what else would they be doing? There’s nothing new under the sun, and each generation needs a retelling of the classics.
Yet, the cynicism starts percolating when a revered classic is shoddily and hastily dressed up in some new, ill-fitting clothes, and it seems clear that the whole endeavor was less about magic and more about money. But all those suits sincerely hope there will be huge magic and huge money. The problem is it’s fiendishly difficult to remake a classic. The original is a really, really hard act to follow.
A lot of it may be Rob Marshall’s direction of the non-animated scenes, so that they come off like a high school production of “The Importance of Being Ernest”: lots of blocking and business and no cohesion, or—magic.
I think Disney tried hard, but the only thing about “Mary Poppins Returns” that should have returned is Emily Blunt in the titular role. Actually, come to think of it, Dick Van Dyke, at age 93, in a tiny, disguised cameo, has more charisma and comedic chops than the entire Banks family put together, and Meryl Streep has herself a looney ball as Poppins’s Russian cousin, which is just tolerable. The rest of it is a crashing bore.
On the bright side, they managed to capture just enough of a whiff of the original 1964 magic so that I, never having seen the original since, was bonked on the head with enough nostalgia to now want to see the original “Mary Poppins” again.
