Finally saw this film and I was most let down. The movie - set 25 years after the original - opens with a pair of lawyers posting an eviction notice on the door of the Banks' home. Michael (Ben Whishaw) had taken out a loan after his wife died and has absent-mindedly failed to make payments for the last three months. Though willing to pay the three month due, it is too late for that. He must pay off the entire loan. Not a problem, he has shares in the bank from his father. But he has misplaced them. When finally discovered, he had used the share certificate to draw a sketch because he must have been short on paper. Only by happenstance does his youngest son save the sketch - not to frame or save as a family keepsake - to cut in pieces to patch an old kite. Michael is a pathetic, incompetent man-child, a hopeless buffoon. I disliked him from start to finish. To make matters worse, Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) declares that she will stay until the door opens. Which door is that? The door that allows Michael to view the world as he did in childhood. Helpless widower with three children retreats into childhood.
Then we have Michael's older sister, Jane (Emily Mortimer). She is a spinster who spends her time picketing for workers' rights, a throw back to her mother's suffragette marches in the original film. It is unclear how she earns a living or why, at this late date, she should be romantically attracted to Jack the lamplighter (Lin-Manuel Miranda). She acts like some teenaged girl with her first crush around Jack. Jane is in her mid-thirties and should have had much better options than Jack that she clearly skipped.
All the dazzling musical numbers, the return of Dick Van Dyke, and talents of Miranda and Blunt can't overcome these underlying facts. Michael is a failure and will continue to be a failure. He escaped his deserved fate this time thanks to Deus ex machina. He and his children will not be so lucky next time. Jane's romance with Jack is just a fling; if she was seeking marriage, she would have long since been married. Clearly, if this is the adults they came to be, Mary Poppins failed them as a nanny.
Watch the original instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment