Posted on 01/03/2019 7:43:51 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.
Emily Blunt in Mary Poppins Returns (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.) Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.
Also unmistakable is the nasty political undercurrent that prevents this reboot from being escapist fun. Take the new politically instructive songs in Mary Poppins Returns. Sure, they’re the usual Marc Shaiman pastiche — cliché Broadway compositions (from the composer of the lame musical Hairspray) that lack the memorable delight of Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs for the original Mary Poppins in 1964.
Incapable of a charming tongue twister, or relatable lyrics about medicine in sugary spoonfuls, Shaiman assimilates the #Resistance mood that has overtaken Broadway and Hollywood. Though pretending to be innocuous family entertainment, the knock-off tunes have a faintly repressive, pedantic note, especially in Shaiman’s balloon-song finale “Nowhere to Go but Up.” To careful listeners, it sounds like showbiz Stalinism: “The past is the past / It lives on as history / Let the past take a bow / Forever is now.” Why should a family-movie ditty recall the essence of Soviet erasure of history?
That erasure also reeducates memories of the first Mary Poppins film in which a subservient female nanny, who shows up weirdly out of nowhere, supports the bumbling male head of a stuffy British banking household. She sustained England’s class system almost supernaturally — or supercalifragilisticexpialidociously. Now Mary returns for no better purpose than commercial repackaging. (Meanwhile, minor characters play out a Socialist subtext, campaigning for underpaid workers.)
MPReturns rectifies dated gender notions by making the nanny inhumanly asexual — but enlightened. Actress Emily Blunt’s Mary charmlessly embodies inauthentic emotions. (A British accent works wonders on the inferiority complex of Americans.) Lacking Julie Andrews’s enigmatic blue-eyed calm and genuinely lovely soprano as the original Mary, Blunt (named after a truncheon?) seems little more than a schoolmarm martinet. She submits her prepubescent household charges to a bubble-bath fantasia — the film’s video-game visual peak — that neither individualizes them nor enchants us. She even trots up on the stage when the filmmakers can think of no forthright way she can rescue her employers.
Julie Andrews, for the only time in her career, conveyed magical strangeness as Mary, suggesting a maternal Peter Pan — a weird imp, encouraging helpful idiosyncrasy to a new generation. Blunt never rises above the diligence of an out-of-town try-out; she fits director Rob Marshall’s Chicago specialty casting of non-singers and non-dancers.
MPReturns hits rock bottom when Mary visits her cousin Topsy, played by Meryl Streep doing upside-down acrobatics and a fake Russian accent (to suggest some kind of unholy collusion?). The political overtones of Streep’s show-offy turn (everything is supposedly upside down in the era of Orange Man Bad) suggest that Trump Derangement Syndrome has damaged liberal showbiz. Like Blunt, Streep is a no-fun performer.
Dick Van Dyke’s appearance is a welcome surprise and reminder of the first film, just as Julie Andrews’s absence is not. (It’s easy to imagine Andrews telling Disney Corp.: “The only Return I care about is taxes.”) Sure, Van Dyke still shows talent, though not enough of it here to make Millennial viewers care about who this un-Scrooge-like stranger is. But more important, Van Dyke has warmth, unlike the rest of the spiritless cast doing happy-eunuch grimaces. In the original, Van Dyke played a chimney sweep — the role Lin-Manuel Miranda takes on here as street-lamp-lighter Jack. He’s one of the film’s many blatantly diverse ethnic Londoners (the change in occupation, from Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in the original, means that Miranda safely avoids any smudge of blackface).
Nothing in MPReturns matches the profound compassion of the original film’s ballad “Feed the Birds.” Everyone I know responds deeply to that song — even people I don’t know, such as the pop stars behind “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” the 1984 Band Aid telethon for the Ethiopian famine; their “Feed the World” refrain owes a debt to the Sherman brothers’ original Mary Poppins composition. The Shermans’ lullaby awakened listeners to charity, not PC self-righteousness.
It’s too bad the song “Nowhere to Go but Up” is not camp self-parody. Only take kids to Mary Poppins Returns if you want them to grow up aloof, uncharitable, and tone-deaf Antifa thugs.
My wife is going to take the granddaughters to see this movie this weekend. I already told her I’ll sit this one out.
I guess he didn’t like it.
The mere fact that at age 93 Dick Van Dyke can still pull off a dance number makes this film amazing.
The original Poppins wasn’t exactly a paean to conservatism.
Lots of deleterious “heart not head” messaging.
They've got nothing new, just remakes . . .
Thank you for this, I won’t go to see it.
I’ve sent an email to the Free Republic ADministrator requesting that they provide a separate topic for “Theater Reviews” I think it might help it others do too.
LOL. I bet that is exactly why Disney made him a lamp-lighter. Any smudge of soot would have set off a "RACISM!!!!!!" firestorm among the woke crowd that Disney answers to.
It’s Disney.
They have gone over to the Dark Side..........................
“The mere fact that at age 93 Dick Van Dyke can still pull off a dance number makes this film amazing.”
It’s the only reason I’ll try to watch it — free.
Though I’ll probably be able to catch that part on youtube before long.
When Gene Wilder was asked what he thought about the remake of Charlie and the Chocalate factory starring johnny Depp IIRC he said “why?”
I was almost inclined to say this is the same thing only I suspect this one has a left leaning lib agenda.
A spoonful of political correctness makes the social justice go down.
This is profoundly delusional claptrap, who needed to get some text in National Review for a paycheck.
The film is art, and it worships the first film. It’s about magic. It’s not about politics AT ALL. If you see it is about politics then you are no different from a wacko who saw plane flying overhead and decided it meant Trump was evil and you must have a safe space. That’s what this reviewer is, a wacko, but of a different flavor. No less wacko.
It’s based closely on the books. There is no agenda when you are close to a book. You are interpreting text into visuals. The guy in the film missed some bank payments and some evil guy at the bank wanted to foreclose, but in in this wacko reviewer’s world, the finding of ever-so-very capitalism focused stock shares hidden in a kite was to be the mechanism for paying off the mortgage entirely. But they missed a portion of the shares (it had been torn into pieces) and so an old banker comes in and announces money deposited 20 yrs prior had grown and will more than pay for the house.
Yes, all socialism — “to the careful viewer” errr “to the careful wacko”.
It’s good Trump showed up and demonstrated that “conservatism” is often just efforts to secure entrenchment. This reviewer is card carrying GOPe and is safely ignored.
Well said and written. I saw the movie and concur with your comments about it and the NR movie reviewer. Thank you.
Movies have sucked for years.
Have you seen the endless bumper adds for this movie about Chenney and Bush called Vice.
Indoctrination continues
How can Conservatives defend against? I work in progressive company.
Only a socialist would cover up this conspiracy.
“Movies have sucked for years.”
What movies have you seen in the last few years?
.
My reaction to the remake of “Dumbo” was the same as Mr. Wilder’s... Why?
The classic is a classic for a reason.
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