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Every day I feel so grown up. I wake up, trim my big manly beard, turn on the news and listen to the world falling apart. I trudge to work on the subway and we all glare at each other waiting to scream. I am tall and broad and oft deflated these days. The circles under my eyes tell tales nobody's listening to. Movies are a fine escape, the best one next to sexual relations most probably, but even with the world's burdens beckoning every day I'm still the last person to argue that that's all they should be, an escape - I sit down and I want to be challenged, I want to be horrified, I want to spend time learning what it's like to live in another person's shoes.
But then a movie like Mary Poppins Returns comes along and my beard falls off, my feet float, and the years I have accumulated shed off like pink snakeskin. The shrieking devil that is Donald Trump disintegrates on my shoulder, nothing but fairy dust that the wind picks up and blows right away. Light and air and songs shine, the sun shines, I dip my toes in a soft warm fuzzy happy place and go slack with sweet bright forgetfulness for two exquisite hours.
I'm not even much a fan of the original Mary Poppins - I saw it enough as a child, as one does, but it was never a favorite staple. (It didn't even make the runners-up on my "Favorites of 1964" list that I just randomly happened to post yesterday.) And lord knows I take every opportunity I get to side-eye Movie Musicals - I went into MPR with a 2018 track record of being 3 for 3, deeply loathing every Movie Musical the year had thrown at me.
And yet ten minutes into Mary Poppins Returns I felt myself twinkling like magic. And the second that Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer walked on-screen as the adult Michael & Jane from the original I knew I was fully lost - any movie that would cast those two perfectly perfect people as our forgetful siblings who need to be reminded of the joy available right at our everyday fingertips, that movie has us all in good, firm hands. I was lost, happily unburdened, a cotton candy soul.
Whenever there are dark days about, and we live in dark days, people point to the films of the Great Depression, the Shirley Temple cutesy-toots and Fred n' Ginger toe-tapping romances, as the Great Antidote - what kept us afloat. Mary Poppins Returns is all that and a tub of bubbles. It sparkles. Marc Shaiman's music, Sandy Powell's costumes, Lin-Manuel Miranda's way with a little ladder - the film transported this weary soul up into the clouds for a wee moment. Troubles, what are those, I don't even recognize the word, they melted right away.
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7 comments:
My god you make me tear up; you are the best blogging writer in the world. Period.
What a nice thing to say! Thank you, DISHY :)
As magical as the original was it still got into some dark territory. Michael causes a run on the bank because he wants to give his money to a poor woman. The run on the bank causes the father to lose his job and be disgraced in front of the board members of the bank and then he tells a joke which ends up killing the old man who ran the bank -- some pretty dark stuff for a "kids" movie.
Anyway, I was wondering if this movie treats its' kid audience as adults as the original one did, or does it stay firmly in the light and fluff?
this review makes me as hopeful and enchanted as the movie made you
i agree with dishy
FieldMedic - it's not just light fluff; for one it's got Ben Whishaw giving a genuinely heartbreaking performance, and all kinds of dark elements (lots to do with evil banks again). And Mary isn't sugary, she's just as vinegary as Travers wrote her.
What a gorgeous piece of writing!
Having been 12 when the first milm came out, and later doing a play based on some of the Travers stories, I was excited to see Mary Poppins Returns, which I did yesterday in Amsterdam at the beautifully restored cinema palace, the Tuschinski. I had tears in my eyes almost from the moment that Lin-Manuel Miranda came onscreen as Jack, and it's the most genuinely teary movie I think I've seen since E.T. I absolutely loved it, and loved the way it was presented. Emily Mortimer was marvelous. The only think I didn't care for was the sequence with Streep, but I loathe her anyway. This is a lovely film!
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