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| I'm Mary Poppins y'all! |
Loosely based on the book series (8 stories in total, published between 1934 and 1988) by author and actress P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins is, no doubt, a very familiar film to everyone reading - and likely to most who aren’t reading, as well. Of all Disney’s live action (or hybrid) movies, this is the one that has been consistently watched and adored by both fans and non-fans ever since it’s original release. Even to those unaware of the bulk of Disney’s non-animated output ("What the hell is a Candleshoe!?"), Mary Poppins is a movie that everyone knows and continues to closely associate with Walt Disney - both the man and the company. That company, of course, is more than willing to continually hype what may be their most popular film, as successive generations introduce their offspring to the film via newly purchased or rented videos, DVDs, Blu-Rays and digital downloads, or even by taking them to see the perennial revival-house favorite on the big screen. Heck, Disney even felt the very creation of it’s own film worthy of a fanciful period drama (2013’s Saving Mr. Banks - an entertaining but bizarre display of company self-referentiality.)
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| Andrews, Disney and Travers at the film's premiere |
And why not? Most consider Mary Poppins to be the “crown jewel” of Disney’s motion picture output, live action or otherwise - and it’s a hard opinion to argue against. Every trick that Disney’s filmmakers had learned up to that point was utilized in the creation of Mary Poppins, and the resulting film was the only one the studio produced during Walt’s lifetime that was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (the first of only four such nods the company has garnered so far.) Even watching today, it’s clear that everyone involved in the film’s production was bringing their “A-game,” and most every aspect of the finished product holds up to repeated scrutiny. From the production design to the music and acting, all the best that each department had to offer was utilized and put on-screen (the only possible weak spot being the animation, which was fine for the time but couldn’t hold a candle to the quality of their late ‘30s/early ‘40s works.)
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| Dance, dance - we're falling apart to half time... |
I know I’ve been a bit harsh on the Sherman brothers in previous reviews, and I stand by my assertion that much of their post-Poppins output was hit-or-miss; that’s only because an overabundance of their creativity seemed to be spent on this lone film. For better or worse, Richard and Robert’s work was never, ever better than it is here. Every single song - from the grandest show-stoppers (such as “Jolly Holiday” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,”) to the smallest melodies (the lullaby “Stay Awake” or “The Life I Lead” and it’s reprises) are excellently composed and full of flawless lyrics. While the film is brimming with wonderful song-and-dance numbers, the Shermans and director Robert Stevenson should also be commended on what was left out, since as many as 21 additional or alternate songs were in various stages of completion during the film’s lengthy pre-production. Such restraint should’ve been held as an example to follow for such later musically over-saturated efforts as The Happiest Millionaire, Pete’s Dragon, and my personal albatross, The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band.
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| My name is Aurora. I'm with Gaston. The good Mary is in the Mirror and she can't leave. Write it in your diary. |
Moreover, to my ears no one has ever sang the Sherman’s particular brand of whimsical lyric better than Julie Andrews. Beyond her obviously striking vocal strengths, there’s something beyond description about the special kind of alchemy achieved between actress and character; about the almost predestined way her voice and those particular words come together, as if they had always existed in some unseen realm. Andrews’ Oscar win for Best Actress was indeed well earned, and came as something of a victorious middle-finger to the producers of the same year’s My Fair Lady. On Broadway, Andrews had originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1956 musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, to great acclaim. However, when casting the George Cukor-directed big-screen adaptation, head of Warner Bros. Jack L. Warner opted for reliable box-office draw Audrey Hepburn over Andrews - despite the fact that Hepburn’s singing voice was deemed inadequate (and therefore dubbed by American soprano Marni Nixon.) While My Fair Lady nabbed the Best Picture statuette that year, Andrews won out for her practically perfect performance as the mysteriously telekinetic nanny.
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| This is the big one! Elizabeth - I'm comin' to join you!! |
Not that the cast’s work was always as pitch-perfect as Andrews’ tuneful singing voice. Let’s address the big cockney elephant in the room: Dick Van Dyke’s accent. Oh me Gawd, what an ‘orrendous vocal-i-zayshun ‘e ‘as! Growing up watching the film (here in the good ol’ US of A, anyhow,) one tends not to notice such a bastardization of enunciation. It’s only when one views the film as an adult (and tries their best to disassociate themselves from nostalgia - nigh on impossible, really) that you realize what gobbledy-gook pours from the lanky funny-man’s mouth for most of the film, his inflections veering from Londoner, to Australian, to American, to whatever-the-hell else you’d call it. Legendary in acting circles as an example of how not to put on an accent, Van Dyke’s vocal was voted as the second-worst film accent by Empire magazine in 2003 (right behind Sean Connery’s Scots-Russian performance in 1990’s The Hunt For Red October.) Apparently (and astoundingly,) Van Dyke’s vocal coach on the film was prolific character-actor J. Pat O’Malley (who supplied a number of voices in the film’s animated sequence,) an Irishman who, according to Van Dyke, couldn’t do cockney to save his life. More’s the pity, too, as otherwise Van Dyke gives his all in a warm and funny performance as jack-of-all-trades Bert, and shows off his impressive dancing skills in the exuberant “Step In Time” number near the film’s end.
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| Caged Heat: The Early Years |
Meanwhile, the dynamic duo of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber are back again, this time with considerable more screentime than in The Three Lives of Thomasina. The chemistry between the two continues to be their greatest strength, as does Garver’s penchant for screwing his face up and looking like a Norman Rockwell character come to life. Dotrice carries some impressive emotional heft in many of the film’s later scenes, sensitively portraying that moment in life when one comes to grips with the fact that their father is not the infallible figure from childhood. While not tasked with as much overtly dramatic (or rather melodramatic) material as she was in Thomasina, Dotrice creates a more understated sadness in her characterization of little Jane Banks, and the results come off all the more impressive.
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| Come at me bro... |
Elsewhere in the cast, due respect must be paid to Disney’s secret weapon, David Tomlinson. The role of George Banks is, on paper, a rather unforgiving one, and could easily have come across as an entirely unsympathetic patriarch. Tomlinson has that very valuable gift of being able to emote through expression, and the ever-present distress that shows in his sad eyes speaks to Banks’ desperate need to cling to the rigid structures of Edwardian society more than his dialogue. One of the most unassumingly telling moments that defines the character comes right in his first few minutes on screen: following “The Life I Lead” (a celebration of conformity,) Banks is informed that his children are “not here, dear” by his wife (an underused Glynis Johns.) His expression rapidly turns to abject terror. This sudden horror is not concern for the well-being of his missing kids, however, but over the fact that something is off in the fixed routine of his world. “Not here!? Well of course they’re here! Where else would they be!?” he stammers as the tenuous peace of his very existence is threatened.
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| How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat!? |
In the aforementioned Saving Mr. Banks, much credence was given to the notion that Mary Poppins is, above all else, the story of the father’s salvation. This is not really evident in the film itself, and frankly is utter malarkey. Despite the fact that much of the climax centers around George Banks’ realization that his unyielding fidelity to the English rat race has caused him to marginalize his children (the totality of his parenting apparently restricted to “pat(ting) them on the head and send(ing) them off to bed”,) this is just one of several plots running through the film. If there’s anything that can be faulted with Mary Poppins, on a fundamental level (rather than details like Van Dyke’s shit accent,) it’s that all the wonderful music, art and spectacle on display is in support of an episodic, somewhat fragmented script. This isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw, when all’s said and done, since the particular story being told (about a magic nanny and her effect upon a family in crisis) is actually well suited to this less-focused approach.
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| Oh what a feeling, when you're dancing on the ceiling... |
However, much of what works best (and what most audiences walk away with) is not the story of George Banks and his eventual redemption, but the phantasmagorical wonder of Mary Poppins herself - the woman who drops from the sky and threatens to tear down the unyielding structure of English society from within. To suggest otherwise is paying a large disservice to Mary Poppins the film and Mary Poppins the character. What, in Edwardian England (itself really an extension of Victorian ideals slapped onto a modernist world of industry,) is more necessary than complete trust and faith in a well-chosen nanny to take care of the distracting business of nurturing the inheritors of society? Jane and Michael, already rebelling in their own small way just by acting like children, are thus shown by this mysterious stranger that there is a wider world than the one their father (and the culture he allies himself with) wishes them to see; one filled with color and magic, and, conversely, suffering for those (like the bird-woman outside of St. Paul’s cathedral) who fall out of society’s uninviting embrace. For Disney, even 49 years after the fact, to insinuate that everything happening in this story is in support of George Banks and the problem of his conformity merely serves to unfairly (and ironically) cram the untidy wonder of the 1964 original into the confines of their historically questionable “lady-author with daddy issues” biopic, resulting in little more than a corporate circle-jerk.
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| <Grabs pearls> Good heavens! Outrageous!! |
While the Poppins character serves as a means to disrupt and bring change into the lives of those she touches, much of the sly holding up of mirrors to iron-clad social norms (represented by the number of emphases on mirrors) is unfortunately undone by yet another too-tidy conclusion. Yes, at the film’s climax George Banks rejects his place within the socioeconomic framework that keeps him from being a better father, instead choosing to “go fly a kite” (in other words, to “get lost”.) However, in the closing minutes of the film, this nose-thumbing to "adulthood" is rendered moot, as Banks is inexplicably re-hired the very next morning - as a full partner, no less. Thus the metaphorical gesture of mending his children's kite (representing their broken relationship, of course,) is rendered as just that: a gesture, an indicator of a momentary respite of family togetherness that will likely evaporate not long after Mr. Banks returns to work the next business day. All's well, we're meant to assume, since at least Mr. Banks will be paid a better wage for his family's troubles. This doesn’t even bring up that Winifred Banks’ “votes for women” protesting is treated, much like George’s career, as an obstacle that must be overcome in order to bring the family unit closer together. The fact that the film pays so little attention to the matriarch following the rousing “Sister Suffragette” number, instead portraying her activism as a silly distraction, is troubling to say the least. As Mary Poppins flies away, self-assured of her practical perfection, we realize that the enigmatic governess wasn’t so much a wrench in the gears of the early-20th century British status quo, but a means of enforcing the mid-20th century North American status quo of the patriarchal nuclear family, essentially replacing one form of “normalcy” with another.
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| Everything...Everything...Everything...In it's right place...In it's right place...In it's right place... |
This unfortunate smug presentism doesn’t detract from the fact that Mary Poppins is one of the great films of the 20th century - just that it takes all of it’s own crafty dissidence and blows it out of Admiral Boom’s cannon. And unfortunately, being the pinnacle of Walt Disney Productions’ filmmaking apparatus, it meant that many attempts were made afterwards to try and recapture lightning again, with such overwrought period-musicals as the aforementioned Happiest Millionaire in 1967 and ...Family Band the following year. But, there are bright spots to Mary Poppins’ legacy, in that one of those attempted grabs for glory actually got hold of a brass ring; the resulting film positing itself as something of an “anti-Poppins,” celebrating society’s outcasts rather than the middle-class, showing an England on the brink of annihilation rather than in perfect Edwardian order, and it’s female lead not an enigmatic “practically perfect” magician, but a piss-poor would-be witch. And, disappointingly (if unsurprisingly,) this twisted mirror could never have seen the light of day in it's final form until after Walt Disney’s death.
As much as I’d love to jump right into that particular film, I’ve already gone and promised to finish up the trio of movies featuring Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber first - and so next time we’ll be looking at a silly little movie about a bunch of gnomes.
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| Take this job and shove it. |
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