Mary Poppins Returns

Dir: Rob Marshall

2018

***

I liked the original Mary Poppins film as a kid, I gave it a five star review even, but I don’t really hold the same warm memories for it than I do for other such films, such as Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. If they made sequels (not remakes) to either one of those films and didn’t use the original actors I’d be mildly outraged. I’m kind of over being upset about remakes, prequels and silly sequels though and I generally either ignore them or refuse to accept their legitimacy. P. L. Travers wrote a series of Mary Poppins books, so I totally understand why many would want to see a visual representation of her other works, but if you were a true fan surely you’d want a more authentic adaption than what Walt Disney produced? It’s well known, especially following 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks, that P. L. Travers was unhappy with Disney’s 1964 film, after he’d convinced her to make it after three decades of trying. Uncle Walt attempted to produce a sequel the year after the original, but was rejected by the author P. L. Travers, who categorically dismissed Disney's first adaptation. In the late 1980s, then-chairman of Walt Disney Studios Jeffrey Katzenberg and vice-president of live-action production Martin Kaplan approached Travers with the idea of a sequel set years after the first film, with the Banks children now as adults and Julie Andrews reprising her role as an older Mary Poppins. Travers again rejected the concept, except for Andrews' return, suggesting a sequel set one year after the original film with Andrews reprising the role. This idea was also shot down, however, because Travers imposed her own strict rules which were not negotiable. Travers did aim for a sequel though and in the 1980s she and Brian Sibley wrote a screenplay for a sequel entitled Mary Poppins Comes Back, based on the parts from Travers' second Mary Poppins book unused in the 1964 film. Sibley then wrote a letter to Roy E. Disney about making the film, to which Disney contracted them to supply a film treatment. According to Sibley, Travers wrote notes on his script ideas and though she rejected some of them, she liked some of them too, including replacing Bert with his brother, an ice cream man in a park in Edwardian London who similarly served as Mary's friend and potential admirer. Four months later, however, casting issues emerged, as Andrews temporarily retired from making films and wasn't interested in reprising her role as Mary Poppins and it was tricky to find an actor to play Bert's brother, though one executive suggested that Michael Jackson was right for the part. The planned sequel eventually was cancelled upon the casting problems and the fact that new executives were now running the company. Never at ease with the handling of her property by Disney or the way she felt she had been treated, Travers never agreed to another Poppins/Disney adaptation. So fervent was Travers' dislike of the Disney adaptation and of the way she felt she had been treated during the production that when producer Cameron Mackintosh approached her about the stage musical in the 1990s, she acquiesced on the conditions that he use only English-born writers and that no one from the film production be directly involved. She stipulated more rules than that but died before the eventual run, so many of her wishes went ungranted once again. So if you consider yourself a true fan of Travers' work, you wouldn’t go anywhere near 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns. Julie Andrews certainly wasn’t interested, not even for a cameo. The film is nothing but a cash-in for the studio, devoid of any real soul or passion. It’s something that doesn’t bother me one bit. I didn’t much care for it because it was a cheap and modern looking copy of the original and not its own thing. It also couldn’t have tried to copy Paddington any more than it did. They boast that Mary Poppins herself is a lot more how Travers wrote her but again, who cares, at this point and in this version Julie Andrews is and always will be Mary Poppins. That said, I thought Emily Blunt was fantastic in the role and it was nice to see her clearly having the time of her life. Lin-Manuel Miranda however, is no Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke does make an appearance however, playing the elderly son of the elderly gent he played in the first film, which has quite a nice feel about it. Bert, we are told, is exploring the world. Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Julie Walters are there to remind Americans that this is still a twee British film, with British film legislation now requiring Walters to be in every single imported British film. The songs are quite good and I liked the animation, at times it felt like a filmed stage show – which made me think maybe it should have been just a stage show – but none of it was awful. I didn’t for one moment see Ben Whishaw or Emily Mortimer as the Banks kids, and I didn’t care much for the cliché story line but Emily Blunt kept me watching. I also liked the voice cameos from Edward Hibbert, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Addy and the lovely cameo from Angela Lansbury who was originally set to play Mary Poppins in the original. As a whole I found it forgettable but I certainly didn’t hate it. Interestingly, I asked my older sister and my niece what they thought of it and my sister thought it was on par with the original while my niece thought the original was much better. I’m somewhere in the middle. Like I said, just as long as they don’t remake Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang I’m good.