Mary Poppins Returns (2018, Dir. Rob Marshall)
The Summary: The iconic nanny, Mary Poppins, returns to help the now grown Banks children with a new series of problems in this sequel to the 1964 classic.
The Good: The movie has excellent casting, and almost everyone is swinging for the fences. A few of the songs are really catchy, and it’s great when Lin-Manuel Miranda is given a chance to shine. Production design is also incredibly high, and it’s always nice when Disney gives us even a little bit of traditional animation.
The Bad: Slavishly devoted to the format and formula of the original, to the extent of being comparable on a beat-for-beat basis. Some confusing screenwriting leads to emotional beats being repeated for no real reason.
The Review: I love the original Mary Poppins on a deep and fundamental level. Even though I’m of a generation a little later than those that were raised on it, it was a staple in my house growing up. I have seen the original (at least) dozens of times. Because of that, it’s very difficult for me to be anything even resembling objective in grading a film that so clearly wants to simply be the original. The most important thing to know about Mary Poppins Returns is that it adheres to the pattern of its prequel so fixedly that it’s hard to understand why they even bothered making a sequel at all (except for money, which, of course).
The plot concerns Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt), the seemingly immortal magical nanny, returning to the lives of the children she helped in the original film. Jane Banks (Emily Mortimer) is a labor activist and has returned to her childhood home to help her brother Michael (a humorously mustachioed Ben Whishaw) deal with money problems that have arisen after his wife’s untimely death. His three children have had to grow up too fast, and the family is about to lose the house. Mary Poppins endeavors to fix the lives of all five people with the help (as always) of a humble, working-class bloke, here a lamplighter played by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who apprenticed under the first film’s Bert the Chimneysweep.
The production design in this film is off the charts. Disney clearly pulled out all the stops to make this a visually and aurally fantastic film. Everything looks amazing, perfectly saturated to evoke a feeling of nostalgia. It’s unfortunate that all of this effort is in service of a narrative that is so rigidly formulaic. This movie recreates its original beat-for-beat and song-for-song, in a way that can never work to its advantage. This film features (in order): a learning to do something unpleasant through making it fun song, a journey into an traditionally-animated world, a nonsense narrative song filled with short humorous anecdotes, a mid-film turnaround sad song lullaby, a zany song about how weird one of Mary’s relatives is, a large ensemble nighttime dance number with a bunch of working-class guys, and an uplifting closer about the necessity of joy and wonder in life. For real. It’s that obvious in its copycat tendencies. And the problem is, you’re never going to outshine the original. No matter how talented your cast is or how much money you throw at the problem, you’re never going to make a better “Spoonful of Sugar” or “Steppin’ Time” than the original. And that dooms you to always be considered lesser.
To be clear, they absolutely do the best they can. Emily Blunt is nearly unbelievable as Mary Poppins, and I legitimately can’t think of anyone else who would be able to pull off the imitation as well as her (but it’s still absolutely an imitation). Lin-Manuel Miranda is a joy every moment he’s onscreen, and seems to really be having fun with his cockney accent and fleet feet. The children are also incredibly capable and handle themselves well, especially eldest Anabel (Pixie Davies). As in the original, the distraction of a random Poppins relative, in this case cousin Topsy (Meryl Streep), seems unnecessary and overlong, but the scene is still cute and inventive. They even got Dick van Dyke and Angela Lansbury back out of mothballs for this movie (in a couple of really charming cameos). Michael Banks’ character is probably the weakest, but only because the script demands he be pulled in two opposite directions without any clear transition between the two or reason for it. The movie needs him to be the grumpy, joyless father of the original, but it can’t really because he was the beneficiary of Poppins’ teachings. So he whiplashes back and forth between chill artist dad and suddenly inexplicably angry dad. He feels like he learns the same lesson about chilling out about three times in the movie, and this really lessens both his character arc and the thematic punch of the movie as a whole. Whishaw absolutely does his best with it, though, and manages to pull off a few moments of true pathos despite the chaotic scripting.
I just wish all of this effort were in the service of a film trying to have a message of its own, or a unique aesthetic, or something other than what we ended up with. I’m a big fan of the Disney sequels/re-imaginings that have something to say about their original, like Maleficent or the new Jungle Book. This, however, is just more of the same and is doomed to always be the lesser work. For people who want nothing more to be reminded of the original and luxuriate in their nostalgia, I’m sure this will scratch that itch. For those who have never or rarely seen the original, this is a delightful film that your kids will probably love and that will seem vaguely familiar but pleasant. For people who grew up watching Julie Andrews in the original though, this will only ever seem a pale shadow of its predecessor, incapable or unwilling to break out of its rigid structure and say something of its own.
The Score: 
