AWARDS ARE NOT AS FRIENDLY AS AUDIENCES FOR ‘MARY POPPINS RETURNS’

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emily Blunt and animated friends in 'Mary Poppins Returns'

Oscar News update Feb. 17: 
By announcing Bette Midler as a special Oscar guest, and revealing she will be singing the nominated song for "Mary Poppins Returns," the Oscars have found a backdoor way to correct a clumsy error. The Academy had  earlier announced that none of the nominated songs from "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," "Mary Poppins Returns" and the documentary "RBG" would be performed during the live telecast Feb. 24, in order to shorten the broadcast's time. (Curiously, the film's star, Emily Blunt, had agree to perform if asked, but Oscars decided she wasn't a big enough name.)

The screams from the Disney Studio and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others,were clearly heard. Making Midler perform “The Place Where Lost Things Go” forcefully corrects the problem and the quiet word is that now the other skipped-over best songs will be performed, "I'll Fly"  by the documentary's actual end-credits performer, Jennifer Hudson.

By Dominique Paul Noth

The box office grows but “Mary Poppins Returns” is barely mentioned on the current awards lists (but heavily featured in the TV broadcasts).  There is no award specifically for what Disney and director Rob Marshall have succeeded in doing: “Best Hitting of the Hot Spots of Nostalgia and Freshness of Beloved Material for the Flying Nanny.”

But those elements deserve some recognition from reviews, down to the return of the old Disney look of hand-drawn animation for the mix with “real people”; the clever trickery of the bathtub into ocean; the finding of something useful beyond celebrity billing for the guest stars, and the smart way Emily Blunt doesn’t pretend to be Julie Andrews but it is made to do all the things the original “Mary Poppins” did 54 years ago. 

This Poppins, less sugary but mischievously flinty as was the original, sings a lullaby and catchy instructional songs to two resistant but slowly enchanted children.  With perfect posture, she pirouettes in space and then dances as lustily as music hall conventions allow with her admiring lamplighter Jack, played with broad charm and gusto by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his own bizarre Cockney accent that seems a backhand tribute to Dick Van Dyke’s admittedly horrible Cockney in the original.

For this version, there are no dancing chimney sweeps but there is made-up slang jargon specifically for the street-lamp-lighters in a huge production number (one of several places the movie almost stops to admire its own gymnastic invention, though the same could also be said about the original).

Blunt has moments to prove she can do anything Andrews could (and Julie refused to do a cameo, the story goes, because she wanted this to be Emily’s night on the town).  But Emily will probably be washed out of the awards (she actually proves a more versatile actress in the current horror film “A Quiet Place”) because doing everything well may be what audiences expect but it is not a comfortable character thread for acting awards.

There is one such performance, though – Ben Wishaw as the now grown Michael Banks, a young father having the same adjustment problems as his dad in the original.  Director Marshall, Wisconsin born by the way and a former choreographer now the go-to director for splashy movie musicals, not only has a deft way with countless little callbacks to the original. He also gives full weight to the modern widower musing in song over his lost wife, allowing adults in the audience to grab hold of a reason for Poppins to return to help out and for the outlandish comedy in the story. 

Wishaw just won a Golden Globe for his saucy but demanding gay lover in “A Very British Scandal” TV short series, and well deserved.  His quiet anchoring of attention in “Mary Poppins Returns,” against all the special and magical effects, confirms his talent.

About the songs. Almost every one of the originals has become famous – “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Feed the Birds,” “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” among them. Each has something of a counterpart in this film, so it may be years to see which if any survive.  Disney is putting its money and awards attention behind “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” but songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman had the double duty of coming up with winning inserts of their own and capturing the personality of the original.

Van Dyke, at 93, having to wear old-age makeup to look like his original character’s older self, nails the nifty dance steps, but there are only subtle reminders that his character was meaner in the original. That first world of banking at the turn of the century (this tale is moved into the 1930s) deliberately looked a bit crueler and more in need of magic.  The new movie has to work harder to justify the need for magical intervention.

In an elaborate cameo as cousin Topsy, Meryl Streep resurrects her “Sophie’s Choice” Polish accent but this time for roundly comic effect, and Angela Lansbury, an old Disney favorite, re-imagines under Marshall’s gaze the bird woman of the original. 

The movie constantly turns back in on the original (the background music includes snatches of the original songs) even as it pumps to create its own identity.  After a while it is not so much a movie as an intent to not leave any nostalgic yearning untouched, while still trying to carve its own central people and emotions.  It is a clever entertaining cinematic manipulation, but there is no category for that at awards time.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.