The addition of profound loss fits the Disney dead-mother template, but it invests the movie with a heaviness it can’t persuasively navigate, eventually drowning it in treacle. Set during the Great Depression, also known in Britain as the Great Slump, of the 1930s, the story returns Mary Poppins to the same multistoried house at 17 Cherry Tree Lane. Decades earlier, she had to persuade Mr. Banks to pay attention to his children; now, she has to pull Michael out of his own catastrophic depression so he can tend to his children and save their home from the bank. (They have a housekeeper, played by Julie Walters; Colin Firth all but twirls his mustache as a banker.)
Written by David Magee and directed by Rob Marshall, the movie ratchets up more than the family’s existential stakes. Most everything in “Mary Poppins Returns” looks, feels and sounds like a sales pitch, with the exception of Whishaw’s emotional rawness, which creates jagged little holes in the manufactured uplift. Much seems the same storywise, though, just amped up, including a neighbor with a booming cannon and the big smiles that at times turn characters, including Mary, into avatars for emotions that the movie rarely manages to tap. Blunt is versatile and a fine singer, but like most of the other actors, she’s giving a broad performance rather than a convincingly felt one.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman — who have done memorable work elsewhere — are the gravest disappointment. It may be unfair to compare the new movie’s songs to the originals, which were written by the brothers Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, whose words and music for “Mary Poppins” are among the greatest in the Hollywood songbook. “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Jolly Holiday,” “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” and of course “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” — these are songs that get in your head, body, memory, and there’s nothing here with comparable melodic or lyrical staying power.
There are some fine moments, as well as consistently eye-stroking costumes from Sandy Powell. There’s also “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” a complexly staged number (Marshall is one of the movie’s choreographers) that features Miranda and an army of his fellow lamplighters, known as leeries. This is the contemporary version of the original movie’s rooftop number “Step in Time.” Now, the leeries are massing together and are more earthbound even while jumping in buoyant synchronicity. Some are also riding on BMX bicycles, anachronisms that give the movie a whiff of contemporary desperation that signals an endeavor reaching for honest nostalgia and trapped by bloodless marketing.
from Just News Update http://bit.ly/2QMuI33
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