Tal Fox review Mary Poppins Returns and reports from a special Q&A with director Rob Marshall.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
It’s been nearly 55 years since Mary Poppins last flew into our lives and 25 years since she left the Banks family. But now that Michael and Jane are all grown up, she’s back to remind them about the magic they seem to have forgotten.
In an age where live-action Disney remakes are hitting our screens year after year, it seems like nothing is off limits, but how do you remake a much-loved film that already combines everything we could ever ask for in a Disney musical?
The answer is, you don’t. Whether you watched Mary Poppins in the cinemas during its initial release or on VHS in your living room 30 years later, we all came to love and care about these characters which created a great springboard for the new production team.
I attended a special screening of the sequel Mary Poppins Returns followed by a Q&A with director ROB MARSHALL, who said: “It’s 25 years later now so Michael and Jane would be grown up, so I thought we could explore that idea. What happened to Michael and Jane?
“I needed a big reason for Mary Poppins to come back, so this idea that maybe they had lost a family member came to me. But in addition to that, there’s also a sense of loss from Michael and Jane as they’ve grown up and their sense of childhood wonder has gone. So she needs to come back to reignite that again and help heal this family.”
P. L. Travers wrote a total of eight books about the adventures of Mary Poppins and the Banks family, so it was only a matter of time before someone reached into Mary’s oversized bag and pulled out another larger-than-life adventure for us to all be a part of, and boy, did they get it right.
It’s almost impossible to think of anyone other than Julie Andrews in the iconic lead role but Emily Blunt is practically perfect in both paying homage to the original magical nanny while making the character entirely her own with all the charm and grace you would want.
On casting Blunt, Marshall said: “I knew the moment they asked me, that she was Mary Poppins. It wasn’t even a question, I never thought of anyone else. I knew she had all of the ingredients. It’s a huge task to take on that character but I knew she had the skills as an actress to play all those layers.”
In the lead up to the film, everyone had been wondering whether Lin-Manuel Miranda’s British accent would be ‘less offensive’ than Dick Van Dyke’s and the answer to that is that you’ll just have to go and find out for yourself!
However, no one could better put into words what a joyous performance the Hamilton creator brings to the role than Marshall when he described the actor as: “So full of life, so enthusiastic and authentic, there’s a pure childlike spirit to him and I thought well, that’s Jack.”
Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer as the grown-up Banks children really show the care taken into casting this film, while the three new Banks children are so unbelievably talented that it’s easy to forget how young they really are.
The star-studded cast shows just how much the film means to so many people across so many generations with appearances from Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep, Angela Lansbury and the legendary Dick Van Dyke, yes he is back!
“ Across the board, it was every first choice, everybody wanted to be part of making this film, I was blown away by that,” adds Marshall. “It meant so much to everybody, that first film.”
Marshall explains how important it was for him to keep the spirit of the original film alive. “I really thought: ‘What would I want to see in a sequel?’ I would want to see an animation, live action sequence all hand drawn because I feel it’s in the DNA of Mary Poppins. I would want a big production number that’s athletic and exciting. There were things throughout that I knew were important, I wanted to see the penguins, the penguins were important. What would I miss? What do I feel is the spirit and the lineage of Mary Poppins?”
As the first film he ever saw, Marshall wanted to make sure that a whole new generation would walk away with the same wonderment he did as a child.
“What I remember is not the details, just the overwhelming feeling of escaping into this world of joy and being part of the wonder and the magic of it, that was something so overwhelming to me and I know that it opened my world into musicals.”
This sequel is certainly worth the wait and perhaps the creative team was smart in not even trying to create a song with the same magnitude as ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, but if this score (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) isn’t practically perfect, then it’s pretty much the next best thing.
There’s a lot we can relate to in terms of the time period, which was a deliberate choice by Marshall. “Musicals grew out of the depression era and there’s a reason, people needed them.
“I felt like I could see ourselves, our time in that time, in a darker time when we all need a lift, we all need a sense of joy and injection of hope in our lives. That’s what this film brings and hopefully, you can remember what it’s like to be a child, see life through a child’s eye with wonder and joy again, that’s the message of the film.”
He certainly has Dick Van Dyke’s approval: “He grabbed my hand as we were walking onto the set and he said to me, ‘I feel the same spirit here as I did on the first film on the set’.”
The timing of the film couldn’t be any more perfect as the days get shorter and gloomier and the news always makes us groan, Mary Poppins Returns brings some much-needed magic and colour into our lives.
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