It would be impossible to come up with anything, no matter how perfect, to match the storied history that Suzie and I have (half-real, a quarter conjured, and a quarter, no doubt, make-believe) with Mary Poppins. It is one of the first memories I have with Suzie and it’s remained part of our legend and lore for over four decades. When a movie and its music is that deep in one’s lexicon, any sort of update, sequel, or related entity is doomed to pale in comparison. Happily, Ms. Poppins, and her whimsical lessons of life, manage to retain the magic and wonder of the original, and may just be the classic continuation to see the character through a new generation.
It helps immensely that the film revolves around a winning performance by Emily Blunt, and energetic support from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Guest turns by Meryl Streep, Noma Dumezweni, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury, Dick Van Dyke, and a trio of preciously precocious but not grating children round things out in sparkling fashion. The costumes are deliciously exquisite – sumptuous in color and design – and the animation is seamlessly drawn in, whimsically enchanting for children and adults alike. The story is serviceable, and where it lacks the compelling family transformation of the first, a more somber undertone of loss runs through it, giving the grounding it needs for such fantastical flights of fancy. Mary Poppins is about delight and wonder, and how to conjure each in a world of dim adulthood.
As Suzie and I sat there next to her kids, nearly forty years after we sat at a showing of the original, I pondered part of our journey. As they boarded a cartoon carriage onscreen and rode through a porcelain path of Royal Doulton, I thought of those happy moments beneath a grape arbor or wandering through the forest of a Renaissance fair. Of course I also recalled our first viewing of ‘Mary Poppins’ in the same mall. A finger crushed in the car window. A platter of fried clams. It meant more to us than it could to anyone else in the theater, but that’s the way it’s always been.
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