Movie Review: Mary Poppins Returns

Mary Poppins Returns *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Rob Marshall.

Written by: David Magee & Rob Marshall & John DeLuca based upon the stories by P.L. Travers.

Starring: Emily Blunt (Mary Poppins), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Jack), Meryl Streep (Topsy), Angela Lansbury (Balloon Lady), Emily Mortimer (Jane Banks), Colin Firth (William Weatherall Wilkins), Julie Walters (Ellen), Ben Whishaw (Michael Banks), Dick Van Dyke (Mr. Dawes Jr.), David Warner (Admiral Boom), Pixie Davies (Anabel Banks), Jim Norton (Mr. Binnacle), Jeremy Swift (Gooding), Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (Frye / Weasel), Joel Dawson (Georgie Banks), Nathanael Saleh (John Banks).

 

What is most clear about Mary Poppins Returns is that the filmmakers clearly love the original Mary Poppins. They do a meticulous job of recreating the look and feel of the original film, and pretty much every song in the movie is a response to a song from the original movie. It’s odd then that the one element of the film that is strikingly different to the original film is Emily Blunt’s performance as Poppins herself – who here is chillier than Julie Andrews’ ever was, in a way that both makes her character more interesting that it otherwise would be, and also doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the movie. Strangely though, this doesn’t derail the movie like you would think it would. Instead, it gives an odd tension to the movie that otherwise would not have been there.

 

The basic premise of the plot is that the two Banks children from the first film are all grown up now – Michael (Ben Whishaw) has three adorable children of his own, and is now raising them solo since his wife died within the last year. He is close with his sister, Jane (Emily Mortimer), who is a labor organizer of some sort. Because of a weird loan, the evil head of the bank where their father used to work (Colin Firth) will repossess their house by the end of the week, unless they can find a stock certificate proving they own shares in the bank. This is when Mary Poppins arrives to take care of both generations of Banks children. And it’s also when Jack (Lim-Manuel Miranda), a lamplighter, shows up to just kind of hang out with Mary Poppins and the children because – well, because they need another chipper character who can see.

 

The plot doesn’t really matter. Like the original film, it’s odd that that there’s so much about banking in a children’s movie – especially since it’s also clear that the film is only using the plot as a way to string together musical numbers. The musical numbers in Mary Poppins Returns are an odd assortment of songs – all of which are clearly designed to be a response to the original film. Most of the musical numbers are very well staged by director Rob Marshall – none of them rise to the level of his best work in Chicago (mind you, nothing he has done since Chicago has risen to the level of the best of Chicago) – but they are well handled, mixing animation in when necessary, and coming up with inventive staging for it all. And yet, I have to say other than Trip the Light Fantastic and The Cover is Not the Book- I have pretty much forgotten all the songs themselves in the days since the movie (and those are marginal). The music in the film is merely adequate – and little else.

 

There is a lot I liked about the film though. The production and costume design is excellent, and the filmmakers clearly worked long and hard on setting up the visuals of the film to look like the original – something I very much appreciated. I also quite liked Emily Blunt’s performance. She clearly had the highest bar to clear in the film – no one else is really playing a character we remember that well from the first film, and there are few characters more iconic than Mary Poppins. I liked what she did here – she is colder than Andrews, more prim and proper. There is also a strange air of sadness to her – she seems to be a magical character who exists only to keep teaching people the same lessons again and again, and she is getting tired of it. Blunt can sing and dance with the best of them – and does so here – but there is something in the quieter scenes that’s rather sad about her character.

 

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. I do think that well I appreciated the effort that went into recreating the original look of the film, I think somewhere along the way, they perhaps became too slavishly devoted to the film. There is a sense that the film is a little airless – as it’s so packed with references and nods to the original that it never becomes something unto itself – expect in Blunt’s performance. It gets the job done – it held the attention of my 7 and 4-year-old daughters for more than 2 hours (quite an accomplishment for the 4-year-old). Yet, I don’t know if ultimately it will end up being more than a footnote to the original.

Movie Review: Into the Woods

Into the Woods
Directed by: Rob Marshall.
Written by: James Lapine based on musical by James Lapine (Music and Lyrics by Stephan Sondheim).
Starring: Anna Kendrick (Cinderella), Daniel Huttlestone(Jack), James Corden (Baker), Emily Blunt (Baker's Wife), Christine Baranski (Stepmother), Tammy Blanchard (Florinda), Lucy Punch (Lucinda), Tracey Ullman (Jack's Mother), Lilla Crawford (Little Red Riding Hood), Meryl Streep (Witch), Simon Russell Beale (Baker's Father), Joanna Riding (Cinderella's Mother), Johnny Depp (Wolf), Billy Magnussen (Rapunzel's Prince), Mackenzie Mauzy (Rapunzel), Annette Crosbie (Granny), Chris Pine (Cinderella's Prince), Richard Glover (Steward), Frances de la Tour (Giant).

As often happens when I watch a film adaptation of a stage play or musical, while watching Into the Woods I wished I was watching a stage production instead of the movie. There are just some things that work on stage that don’t really translate to the screen very easily – and the work of Stephen Sondheim seems to be one of them. I liked Tim Burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd more than many did – but it still didn’t approach the level that I viewed of the same musical on stage. And from the first number in Into the Woods – the epic I Wish, which cuts together multiple different storylines, and probably close to a dozen characters singing. I could see how this could work on stage – but it doesn’t work nearly as well on screen, which takes a very literal approach to the cross cutting. This came up time and again throughout the film – numbers and moments that probably worked on stage. I cannot say for sure, as I never saw the play – but I now wish I did. I’m not saying that I thought that Into the Woods is a bad movie – it isn’t really, and for the most part the game cast makes much of the film fun to watch. It’s just that I wanted to like it more than I actually did.

The movie is combines elements of several different fairy tales. Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) wants to go the Kings Festival – but of course her wicked stepmother and stepsisters won’t let her. Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) is sent by his mother (Tracey Ullman) to sell their cow – and ends up with magic beans. Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) heads off to visit her grandmother, and is waylaid by the Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp). And Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) is locked in a tower. These different plot threads are tired together by three other characters. The Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt), live next door to a witch (Meryl Streep) – who tells them they will never have the baby they desire, because years ago she placed a curse of The Bakers bloodline. But she will reverse the curse if they can secure her the four ingredients she needs to reverse her own curse – one from each of the other storylines – within the next three days. So all of these characters head off into the woods.

The play was neatly divided into two acts – the first in which everything we know will happen in these storylines, happen, and everyone gets their happily ever after – and the second act, in which we find out that none of these happily ever afters are actually all that happy. I assume, like most plays, this would run about three hours on stage. In the movie, it is crammed into two hours – with the second act in particular being hacked to bits. It almost seems like after the happily ever afters, the film rushes through their aftermath in the final reel, and the result is a muddled, somewhat confusing mess of a film.

All the flaws of the movie aside, I must admit that I enjoyed much of the film. Even in the first act, this is a much darker film than most fairy tales are. There are sexual overtones to some of the relationships (much muted in the film version, but still there). And the film doesn’t shy away from the darkness and violence in those stories. The music, as one would expect from Sondheim, is brilliant – and for the most part, the cast is game, and throw themselves into their roles with gusto. Emily Blunt is the standout for me – her Bakers Wife is probably the most complex of the characters, and although some of her actions in the second act don’t make much sense, she handles them well – and she has a lovely voice. We already knew that Anna Kendrick can sing – and she makes a great Cinderella – a more complex one than we are used to as well. Meryl Streep goes wildly over the top as the Witch – as she seemingly does in everything these days, but no one does over the top quite as well as Streep – and she does nail the Witch’s big moments. Chris Pine and Bill Magnusson are in fine form as two charming princes – who add some levity to the proceedings in their duet in the first act (although their matching duet in the second act is cut, which undermines things a bit). Johnny Depp on the other hand is pretty much a complete embarrassment as the Wolf – once again playing his character as a complete weirdo – and not a dangerous character in the least. To make matters worse, he apparently also insisted on designing his own costume – and he looks like an idiot. The rest of the costume – by the legendary Colleen Atwood – are brilliant. Luckily, Depp is barely in the film, so he doesn’t derail things too bad.

 
Into the Woods made for an entertaining, if somewhat frustrating, night at the movies. If anything, it made me want to see the play on stage as soon as possible. What works in the movie, works well. What doesn’t, doesn’t work at all. I enjoyed much of the film – but I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. There is the material here to make a great movie – but they only got half way there.

Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ** ½

Directed by: Rob Marshall.

Written by: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio based on characters created by Elliot & Rossio & Stuart Beattie & Jay Wolpert and suggested by the novel On Strangers Tides by Tim Powers.

Starring: Johnny Depp (Jack Sparrow), Penélope Cruz (Angelica), Geoffrey Rush (Barbossa), Ian McShane (Blackbeard), Kevin McNally (Gibbs), Sam Claflin (Philip), Astrid Berges-Frisbey (Syrena), Stephen Graham (Scrum), Keith Richards (Captain Teague), Richard Griffiths (King George), Greg Ellis (Groves), Damian O'Hare (Gillette), Óscar Jaenada (The Spaniard), Anton Lesser (Lord John Carteret), Roger Allam (Prime Minister Henry Pelham).

Normally by the fourth movie a franchise is merely running on fumes and memories of what audiences enjoyed in the past. The original director has moved on, much of the original cast has joined him, and the movie exists solely to cash in on the name the previous installments have established. All of this is certainly true for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie – On Stranger Tides. I went into the movie expecting the worst, and perhaps that’s why I ended up almost liking the movie. It certainly isn’t a great movie – it is marred by the over length and overstuffed nature that all the films in the series have been guilty of, and this time, other than Jack Sparrow, there really isn’t an interesting character on screen, but what it does, it does fairly well. It is a time waster to be sure, but not an altogether unpleasant one.

This time, we find Sparrow (Johnny Depp) without a crew or a ship, but of course being a wanted man. He learns that apparently Jack Sparrow is looking for a crew and is holding a casting call as it were at a local bar – since he isn’t actually doing this, he wonders who is, and goes to the bar himself. There he finds an old love, Angelica (Penelope Cruz) disguised as himself. They argue, it turns violent, Sparrow is knocked out and find himself aboard her ship – which actually belongs to her father Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Meanwhile, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) is now working for the King, and also wants Captain Jack, because he is the only one who knows where to find the Fountain of Youth. Since the Spanish have sent a ship to find it as well, and seem to be making progress, everyone wants Captain Jack’s help. The movie essentially becomes a giant chase – with Blackbeard chasing the Spanish and Barbossa chasing Blackbeard, with Sparrow, of course, looking out for his own self interest at all times.

What I liked about this movie is that it is somewhat scaled back from how the original trilogy ended. The original movie remains the best, because not only was it somewhat original (especially Depp’s performance), but also because it the most straightforward of the series. As we got into the second and third installments, which told one huge story, the franchise got bogged down in far too much convoluted plot for its own good – and then it kept throwing on unnecessary characters on top of unnecessary characters (I’m still trying to figure out what the hell Ken Watanabe was doing in the third movie). Here, free of the over serious Orlando Bloom-Keira Knightley love plot, the movie is free to concentrate purely on Captain Jack – which is where we wanted it to be in the first place.

And yet, the movie still does have an overstuffed feel to it. The Spanish ship adds little to nothing but running time to the plot in this movie, and could have been done without. Barbossa seems to be in the movie mainly because they wanted to bring the fantastic Geoffrey Rush along for another ride, because really, he isn’t given much of anything to do. As Captain Jack’s “love interest”, Penelope Cruz is fine, but as with almost all of her English speaking roles, she lacks the fire she has when acting in her native Spanish (remember, her Oscar winning role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is in an English film – but she speaks almost all Spanish in it). Most disappointing, for me anyway, is that the movie completely and totally wastes Ian McShane as Blackbeard. For Deadwood fans like myself, you know just how great McShane can be, but here, his Blackbeard doesn’t really carry that much weight – doesn’t really seem to be all that dangerous. In fact, he seems like a pathetic coward. Clocking in at 137 minutes, the movie is shorter than the other movies in the series, but still at least a half hour too long. There comes a point where I just get a little bored watching pirates.

It must be said that Johnny Depp seems to still be having fun making these movies. He doesn’t phone it in here, and he is as good as always as Captain Jack. And yet, therein lies part of the problem. When they made the first Pirates movie, Depp’s performance as the effeminate, flamboyant, Keith Richards inspired Captain Jack was daring and original – now it’s about the safest thing in the world for him to do. The original movie turned him for a star into one of the biggest stars in the world. But I am a little tired of seeing him play Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s still entertaining, but there’s no surprises left in that character.

Overall, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides isn’t a horrible movie. It delivers what it promises, and director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine) handles it all fairly well. I doubt that fans of the series, who just want to see Depp prance around in a pirate costume will be disappointed in the film. For me though, it just isn’t enough anymore.

Movie Review: Nine

Nine *** ½
Directed By: Rob Marshall.
Written By: Michael Tolkin & Anthony Minghella based on the play by Arthur Kopi & Maury Yeston & Mario Fratti.
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis (Guido Contini), Marion Cotillard (Luisa Contini), Penélope Cruz (Carla), Nicole Kidman (Claudia), Judi Dench (Lilli), Kate Hudson (Stephanie), Sophia Loren (Mamma), Stacy Ferguson (Saraghina).

Nine is a movie made up of great moments. In fact, there is hardly a scene in Nine that in itself is not wonderful. Based on a Broadway musical, which itself was based on Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, one of the greatest films of all time, Nine is a portrait of a movie director in crisis. While Fellini’s film is a masterpiece, and the best film ever made about a filmmaker, Nine is content to simply tell the story in the broadest of terms. The songs are wonderful, the visual look great, the performances entertaining, but there just seems to be something missing from the movie that prevents it from becoming truly great.

Daniel Day-Lewis is Guido Contini, once the biggest name in Italian cinema, whose last two films have bombed. Now he is 10 days away from starting production on his next film with one major problem - he hasn’t even started the script yet and has no idea what to write. They have already cast Claudia Jensen (Nicole Kidman), one of the biggest stars in the world, and titled the movie Italia. The sets are being constructed, the costume being designed, although no one even knows what time period the movie will take place in. Guido is stuck going to press conferences, dealing with his producers, his costume designer (Judi Dench) and everything else involved in the movie, but he doesn’t want to. Not only that, but his wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard) is getting fed up of being ignored, and his mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz) wants more attention as well. Then there is Stephanie (Kate Hudson) an air headed American reporter from Vogue who seems to have no idea what his films mean, but loves them for all the style.

All of these characters have at least one song, where they bare their soul, and various body parts. Day-Lewis is probably the weakest singer of the group, his voice sometimes sounded more like Count Dracula than Italian. But in the scenes where he isn’t singing, and there are a lot of them, he is wonderful as a man in crisis, who doesn’t know what he wants. Cruz is sexy and seductive as Carla - her number “A Call from the Vatican” is one of the sexiest musical numbers I have ever seen. But as the movie progresses, she becomes more than just tits and ass. Kidman’s role is tiny, but her number “Unusual Way” is perfection. She captures her Brigitte Bardot role just about perfectly. Hudson has another time role, but she again does it wonderfully well. Best in show is obviously Cotillard as Luisa. Her two musical numbers, the sad lament “My Husband Makes Movies” and the angry, burlesque number “Take It All” are the heart of the movie. She takes the role of the wronged wife, and breathes new life into it. She is utterly perfect.

Directed by Rob Marshall, in the same style of his earlier Chicago (musical numbers on stage, the rest in “actual” locations, the film has a distinct look and feel. Dion Bebee’s excellent cinematographer creates a number of iconic images. The film is an ode to the movies of Fellini, and they at least some of the visuals right.

Overall, I enjoyed Nine from beginning to end. Every scene works unto itself. I don’t think the movie ever really coheres into an overall artistic statement. It is a movie of moments, not of a complete picture. When the moments are this good, it’s hard to complain.