Mary Poppins Returns to bring us more of the same

It is more than a little disingenuous to pretend that Mary Poppins Returns is anything more than a thinly disguised remake of the original Mary Poppins (1964). At best you might get away with the modern tendency to describe it as a ‘re-imagining’; what it is not, however, despite the insistence of some of its stars, is a sequel.

Granted the film is set up as a sequel of sorts in that that magical nanny, now played by Emily Blunt, reappears again at a time of crisis for the Banks children. This time not for the little ones but the original children who are now full-grown; Michael (Ben Whishaw) is a widowed and penniless artist trying to care for his children while Jane (Emily Mortimer) is a social activist implicitly waiting for a man to rescue her.

Mary arrives with the trusty Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), a lamp lighter rather than Dick van Dyke’s chimney sweep, and – spit, spot – all is sorted as you knew it would be from the moment Chekhov’s share certificate made an appearance in the script.

It is a perfectly charming film but for me it lacks the courage of its own convictions in that it can never quite free itself from the shackles of the source material. Rather than carve out new narrative territory they seem content to thrash around in the undergrowth of the old.

They have gone to the trouble of hiring Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the men behind Hairspray, and they have written a score full of lively, jolly, and touching songs. However, none of them is as good as any of the originals and, bizarrely, they all seem deliberately designed to evoke the memory of the older, better, songs.

Can you Imagine That, Trip a Little Light Fantastic, and The Place Where Lost Things Go, are thin facsimiles of A Spoonful of Sugar, Step in Time, and Feed the Birds and can’t hold a candle to any of them. They’re decent songs, they’re just not classics.

This happens throughout the film where all the set-pieces, including the live-action/animation mix, seem intended to remind you of the first film. This is a shame because there is enough talent, imagination and energy here to have come with a memorable film all their own.

It’s just that they seem determined to insist that nothing has changed, or possibly will ever change, in Cherry Tree Lane so the film is a little narratively hamstrung.

Emily Blunt’s Mary is a little icier than Julie Andrews but the characterisation works, Miranda is a decent foil – even though Dick van Dyke now no longer has the worst mockney accent in the movies – and Michael and Jane have grown up just as you hoped they might as played by Whishaw and Mortimer.

Mary Poppins Returns is an entertaining film and not without its charms. What it lacks, I feel, is the passion and drive of someone like Walt Disney who, as we saw from Saving Mr Banks (2013), was determined to bring P.L.Travers stories to the screen. She wrote eight Mary Poppins novels, I believe, surely someone at the Disney organisation could have had the drive to take one of them and let Mary pick up her brolly and fly to a new adventure.

The Old Man & the Gun is an absolute delight

 In his inestimable book Adventures in the Screen Trade, the recently deceased screenwriter William Goldman recalls a studio executive dismissing Robert Redford as just another Hollywood blond. ‘Throw a stick at Malibu,’ he opined, ‘and you’ll hit six of him’.

The executive is, fortuitously, left nameless and the passage of time has proved him spectacularly wrong. But to some extent he may have had a point. In his early TV career Redford was competing against the last knockings of teen heartthrobs such as Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, and others.

Despite great early film performances in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Chase (1966), This Property is Condemned (1966) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda who was tarred with the distaff side of the same brush, it was easy to dismiss him as just another attractive face in the crowd.

It wasn’t until Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) that Redford achieved what we would now class as superstardom. Once he was in charge of his career and his choices he put together a resume that ranks with the best of his generation. Like his Butch Cassidy co-star and great friend Paul Newman, Redford had to grow out of his looks and into his talent to be taken seriously but it has been worth it.

He is one of those actors who has had the misfortune to appear in the occasional bad movie but also the good fortune to never himself be bad in any movie he was in. Indecent Proposal (1993) is an ideal example; it’s a terrible movie but Redford is the one decent thing in it. Along the way he has also put together an interesting career as a director and producer, not to mention setting up the Sundance Institute which became the foundation of the American indie movement in the Eighties.

All of which brings us to The Old Man & the Gun which Redford suggests may be his last film as an actor. If it is, and I earnestly hope that it isn’t, he is leaving us with one of his finest screen performances.

David Lowery’s film is based on the true story of Forrest Tucker – the bank robber not the character actor. Forrest broke out of San Quentin at the age of 70 and embarked on one of the most improbable crime sprees in American criminal history. Using not much more than charm and a smile – the titular gun is never fired – Forrest and his ‘gang’ (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) cut a larcenous swathe across the American Midwest.

Forrest is a perfect Redford character. Not an outright maverick but someone who is blessed with a gift for seeing the world not as it is but as how he would like it to be. If Redford has an acting style it’s one of studied curiosity; there’s a slightly pragmatic edge to his dreams. In that sense he is perfectly cast here. This film, which he also produced, is Redford’s contemplation of his career, just as Clint Eastwood reflected on his in Unforgiven (1992) and Gran Torino (2008).

Lowery’s ‘mostly true story’ – a nod perhaps to Butch Cassidy’s ‘Most of what follows is true’ – unwinds at a leisurely pace. The story is embellished slightly by the addition of a significant love interest in the shape of Sissy Spacek’s elderly widow, Jewel.

The scenes between Redford and Spacek are utterly charming. There are none of the facial tics or emotional indication of many contemporary stars. Here you have two of the best in the business giving it their all in an atmosphere of mutual respect. It doesn’t seem like acting at all, it feels rather as though we have been allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation. Their naturalistic underplaying makes both characters utterly convincing and Jewel humanises Forrest for the audience to make the ending all the more poignant.

The Old Man & the Gun may look odd to contemporary audiences but Lowery has gone out of his way to create an aesthetic that resembles the period in which it is set. The grain of the film, for example, is forced to look like a Seventies movie, the camera movement is restricted, and even the title is in the same archaic font as that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

If this is indeed Redford’s swan song then it is a glorious send off. But it also marks the emergence of David Lowery as a major directing talent which redresses the balance somewhat.

Into the Spider-Verse is an amazing experience

Although the comic book movie is undoubtedly the most popular contemporary movie genre it has never quite captured the sheer thrill of a well-written comic book. All the CGI in the world cannot replicate the smell, the feel, and the immersive delight of these four-colour fables.

The best of the MCU or the DCU never actually feel like comic books; for all their delights they exist somewhat at arm’s length. With their intergalactic armadas and levitating cities they provide spectacle but it is fundamentally empty. There is no movie equivalent of the well-crafted single panel in a nine-panel page that provides key character detail.  The only recent comic book movie that has come close, for me, is Spider-Man 2 (2004) which Sam Raimi cleverly imbued with a sense of freewheeling fun and a classic comic-book villain.

All of that changes with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which is, by a distance, the best Marvel Comics movie made so far. It really feels like running your eye over the pages of a comic book, or indeed more than sixty years of comic books since it encompasses all of the styles and visual hallmarks of just about every Spider-Man iteration since 1962.

It is, to all intents and purposes, not so much a comic book movie as a moving comic book. Co-director Bob Persichetti says they were trying to recapture the feeling of flipping through a comic so it’s no surprise that physical comic books feature so prominently in the narrative. He and his fellow directors, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, had to come up with a brand-new technique which marries hand-drawn animation with the latest in computer-generated technology. The results are startling.

Into the Spider-Verse is a fusion of comic, video game and movie formats featuring multi-panel storytelling, thought bubbles, text boxes, and neon bright colours. It is a sensory onslaught and it works superbly.

To begin with we have a ‘new’ Spider-Man.  Miles Morales was introduced in 2011, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pichelli, to provide more diversity in the Marvel Universe. He is a young black kid who gets bitten by a genetically modified spider and starts to develop powers he’s not quite sure of. Miles lives in a world where Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but in trying to come to terms with his new powers he not only witnesses the death of Spider-Man but also discovers something else he shouldn’t.

There is more than one dimension out there and each one has its own version of Spider-Man. These include ‘our’ Spider-Man who also appears with a noir version, a teenage Spider-Gwen Stacy, an anime Spider-robot, and the magnificent Peter Porker, Spider-Ham – a talking cartoon pig.

They have all been transported to Miles’s world by the machinations of The Kingpin and it falls to Miles to counter the threat to his world and return the heroes to their own worlds before they die.

The story leaps off the screen. The writing-producing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the men behind The Lego Movie are the driving force here with exactly the right balance of humour and pathos.  It’s not so much about great power begetting great responsibility, instead this is Spidey as a metaphor for adolescence. Spider-Man gets knocked down but always gets back up; a recurring theme in the life of ‘our’ Spider-Man who is seen here, out of shape, separated from the love of his life, and on the brink of an existential crisis.

Into the Spider-Verse is very funny, whip-smart but also very dark. Apart from Peter Parker’s mid-life crisis, there are several deaths which are fundamental to the story. Perhaps not for the kids, unless they’re genned up on quantum physics and the theory of multiple realities.

The script is extremely well acted with a great voice cast which includes Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Hailee Steinfeld, Live Schreiber, Lily Tomlin and Nicolas Cage amongst others.

That said, it’s the visuals that are most important – it’s a completely immersive experience. It will make your head spin but at the same time it’s the only thing that captures the sheer exhilaration of reading those magnificent Stan Lee and Steve Ditko stories in the Sixties. Given that we have lost both men in the past few months the timing of the release is quite poignant but the tributes to Lee and Ditko here are entirely appropriate and genuinely heartfelt.

The only downside for me was that I could have done with seeing more of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham but even so this is such a rich visual experience, jam-packed with Easter eggs, I’m going to have to watch it several times to get the full benefit.