Mary Poppins Returns: Why Disney's new film is the spoonful of sugar we all need

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Melanie McDonagh29 November 2018

The wind is in the east and there’s a kite blowing about. So you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?

Out of the sky, borne on that very kite, there will come a familiar figure, with a turned-up nose and a parrot-headed umbrella: Mary Poppins has come to take charge at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, where the Banks family are in the dilapidated house at the end. And just as she came, she will eventually go, borne on a west wind with her umbrella held up. But this time it’s an unfamiliar figure under the hat: Emily Blunt in Mary Poppins Returns, Walt Disney’s sequel to the 1964 original, which will be released just in time for Christmas on December 21.

There are other changes. This time Mary Poppins returns to London in the depressed Thirties, although, mind you, PL Travers’s first Mary Poppins book was published in 1934.

And this time the Banks family is that of Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw), the little boy of the stories who has grown up and has three children of his own. He has suffered a family bereavement — his sister Jane? His parents? — plus financial difficulties and he and the new Mrs Banks and the three children need cheer and discipline. Come the hour, come the nanny, and Mary Poppins returns in her old style, gliding up the bannisters just like the old days.

Emily Blunt is already being tipped by pundits for an Oscar for her performance. There’s a stellar cast: Colin Firth as William Weatherall Wilkins, head of the Fiduciary Bank; Lin-Manuel Miranda as Bert — a lamplighter rather than a chimney sweep this time; Meryl Streep as Mary Poppins’s cousin Topsy and — be still my beating heart — Angela Lansbury as the Balloon Lady and Dick Van Dyke, all of 92 years old, doing a tap dance on a desk as Mr Dawes Jnr, a bank clerk. Apparently, Dick Van D — Bert as was — livened up rehearsals by singing It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary between takes to Blunt. The flirt.

From the trailers and teasers, it’s plain that Disney has taken care to include lots of elements familiar from the last film. There’s animation as well as live film, including dancing elephants (see also Bedknobs and Broomsticks). There’s a scene set on Big Ben, though St Paul’s also features as before. Mary Poppins still has a carpet bag — just like PL Travers’s aunt — and a dolphin surfaces in the bath, just to show the children what she can do.

And the song, Trip a Little Light Fantastic, by an assembly of lamplighters looks like an action replay of the chimney sweeps’ dance led by Van Dyke in the first film. Oh, and there’s a carousel, like the one that bore Mary and Bert off to tea on her day out. Plus a scene with lots of dogs of assorted sizes, which didn’t feature in the books

It all hangs on Blunt, and it’s notable that she prepared for the part by reading the books, not by trying to channel Julie Andrews. “She was so clear to me from reading that I decided not to be intimidated by the iconic Julie Andrews in the iconic role, and just approached it as I would any other part,” she said.

Nanny state: Emily Blunt in Mary Poppins Returns
Jay Maidment

So far so good but, oddly, her accent fluctuates from posh, like Miss Blunt herself, to Cockney, which is very unlike Mary P. Plus, modelling the part on Rosalind Russell’s fast-talking journalist in His Girl Friday, this Mary talks very quickly, which seems unlike the Poppins of the book, who is invariably self-assured, not to say, smug.

Plainly, this is a feel-good Poppins for febrile times. “The world is fragile right now,” Blunt observed in an interview without mentioning the word Brexit, “and people need a film like this.”

Well, there’s always a place for dancing lamplighters. But the real question is, what would Mary Poppins’s creator have made of it? She wouldn’t, I think, have had a problem with one of her children growing up — she was very keen on JM Barrie and, if you recall, at the end of Peter Pan, Wendy grows up and her little girl has adventures with Peter Pan in turn. She was also fine with sequels: Mary Poppins in the Park was written for the interstices within the original three Poppins visits, though the author did warn that “she cannot forever arrive and depart”. Tell that to the Disney studios.

But it’s at least doubtful that PL Travers — the pen name for Helen Lyndon Goff — would care for Mary Poppins Returns any more than she did for the original, which she famously detested. She rowed with Walt Disney endlessly about the film, kept submitting critical memoranda and scripts of her own and, when she wasn’t offered tickets for the premiere, blagged one from a member of staff and cried openly throughout, she hated it so much.

How did she hate it? Let me count the ways. She didn’t like Dick Van Dyke (she had wanted Laurence Olivier); she thought Julie Andrews was too sweet, not to say, saccharine, and she hated the music. She took the money, obviously (she only agreed to a Walt Disney version because she was broke) and was so cross about the collaboration that when it came to a stage adaptation, one of her stipulations was that there should be no Americans.

And this version has music which she would almost certainly not regard as any better than the ones first time round; it has animation, which she detested; it hasn’t anyone remotely like Laurence Olivier; and it has a very pretty Mary Poppins — Emily Blunt is described in one breathless magazine interview as having the “rose-petal beauty of a Fragonard painting”. Look, if there is one thing Mary Poppins is not it is like a Fragonard picture.

PL Travers kept an iron grip — think JK Rowling here — on the publication of the books, including the type and the illustrations by Mary Shepherd, daughter of the Wind in the Willows illustrator. And from those illustrations and the very specific descriptions of Mary in the books, we find she is not beautiful, though very pleased with herself, exceedingly well turned out, with blue eyes and a turned-up nose.

But more than that. Where the Walt Disney studios miss the point of Mary Poppins is that she is not just a nanny — based on a combination of PL Travers’s aunt and one of the women who helped in her home (whom she described as seeming far better dressed than her mother) — but is an elemental creature as well, with origins that go far back in time.

In a lecture she gave to a US university, she declared that Mary Poppins had “come out of the same world as the fairy stories”. Think here the strange and terrible ones of Tolkien, not Disney.

So although this film is bound to succeed — it can hardly help but do brilliantly — be under no illusions that Disney has captured Mary Poppins any better than last time. For that you will simply have to read the books.

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