'Mary Poppins Returns' brings life's lessons with a dose of magic

Over half a century after we first met her on screen, the winds have blown Mary Poppins our way again. The wait for the magical nanny’s return has been long, but well worth it.

Directed by Rob Marshall, Mary Poppins Returns is set in the London of 1935 — 20 years after the first movie — when the city is in the midst of the “great slump”. Winter is on its way out, but the gloom hasn’t lifted — at least not from the Banks’s home where we met the nanny last, in the 1964 Mary Poppins that had Julie Andrews in the titular role. The Banks children, Michael (now played by Ben Whishaw) and Jane (Emily Mortimer), have grown up.

As a grieving man who lost his wife a year earlier, Michael is trying to hold it together for his three children, and failing miserably. The children, on their part, are trying to hold it together for their father and in the process are putting their childhood aside. The family that is falling apart is dealt another blow when the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, from which Michael has taken a loan, warns him that his house would be repossessed if the money is not repaid in five days.

Into this desolate setting arrives Mary Poppins, played so brilliantly by Emily Blunt that you do not for a moment miss Julie Andrews, which is something to say. Like her, the talented Lin-Manuel Miranda matches the charm and moves of Bert, the chimney sweep played by Dick Van Dyke in the earlier film. As Jack, a lamplighter and former apprentice to Bert, he’s the one who opens the film on a hopeful note with the song “Underneath the Lovely London Sky” and then carries that mood throughout, every now and then lifting the fog of despair and worry from the children.

Fifty-four years is a long gap for a sequel. The world has changed many times over since. Some of that change is reflected in Mary Poppins Returns, which is of course magical, but along with magic it also has melancholy. Blunt is a sterner Mary Poppins than Andrews and she brings with her both enchantment and an understanding of the children’s situation — their hopeless grief at losing their mother and their worry about losing the family home. “The Place Where Lost Things Go”, the song she sings to them as they wake up from a dream turned nightmare, reflects the understanding that magic cannot mend everything. So she uses it as a facilitator to encourage the children to fix things themselves and to steer them from despair to optimism.

A still from Mary Poppins Returns

One of the most delightful scenes in the film is when she and Jack take the children to her eccentric Eastern European cousin, Tatiana Antanasia Cositori Topotrepolovsky, or Topsy (Meryl Streep), who runs a fix-it shop in London. It’s the second Wednesday of the month, the day when Topsy’s world turns turtle. The ceiling is now the floor and the floor’s the ceiling and her worldview is all messed up. What do you do when something like this happens, Mary Poppins asks. Simple, look at things from another point of view. Now if there is one lesson we need to learn today, this is it. Streep, in this brief appearance, meanwhile, once again establishes her versatility.

Right from the time it opens till the credits roll, the film flows like a dream. The cinematography, the painted London landscapes, the music (composed by Marc Shaiman), the lyrics (by Shaiman and Scott Wittman), the dances and the animation all come together seamlessly. P L Travers, on whose book series the film is based, would perhaps be happier with the sequel than the original because, like her series, it carries a tinge of sadness.

Mary Poppins Returns will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will lift your spirits and make you want to look at the world afresh, like a child. If that’s not magic, what is?