Looking at Mary Poppins Through a Glass Magically

In an era keen on updating classic movies—or at least concocting sequels—I admit I have not yet watched the new Mary Poppins Returns, in which Emily Blunt cavorts with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yes, I’m curious to see how these two super-amiable performers handle their respective roles. Nonetheless my heart still belongs to Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, despite the latter’s atrocious mangling of Cockney English.

Last night I took a turn down Memory Lane when I re-watched the original Mary Poppins, the 1964 Disney musical that introduced film audiences to Broadway’s Julie Andrews and the always-useful word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” I’m dating myself in admitting that this film debuted (at L.A.’s palatial and now long-gone Carthay Circle Theatre) during my senior year in high school. Of course in one sense my friends and I were far too old for a juvenile entertainment about two small kids and their nanny. But I suspect that’s part of why we kept going back to see it. On the brink of leaving our families behind as we went off to college and the big world beyond, we felt suddenly sentimental about the cheery days of our childhoods. We’d all encountered P.L. Travers’ series of Mary Poppins books years before, back when we first learned to read. Though Andrews was, frankly, too pretty and too perky (what’s all this “spoonful of sugar” business?) to be Travers’ acerbic nanny, we loved her just the same,  And it was only natural for us to think of our own early days as magic times.

Re-watching Mary Poppins in the company of a seven-year-old boy and a little girl who’s almost five, I delighted in it all over again. The kids loved the jokes (“A wooden leg named Smith!”), as well as such flabbergasting moments as the characters popping into chalk pictures and having tea parties on the ceiling.  As for me, I was reminded of the movie’s technical cleverness. In an era long before the advent of CGI, amazing things happen. There’s also a fabulous chimney-sweep dance number that rivals the barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for male Terpsichore, as well as some droll sight gags and the wonderful work of a slew of character actors. The cast includes such British treasures as  Arthur Treacher, Reginald Owen, Arthur Malet, and the hilariously furious Elsa Lanchester (the Bride of Frankenstein herself!) as a departing nanny. In the larger roles of the children’s parents, it’s a pleasure to see David Tomlinson as a strait-laced papa and Glynis Johns as a lovingly addled mama. And some Old Hollywood royalty appears too: that’s Ed Wynn as the buoyant Uncle Albert (he who floats aloft because he can’t stop laughing) and Jane Darwell (an Oscar-winner as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath) selling bird-seed on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Of course, there are some awkward Disney ironies too. We might well question Disney’s trivializing of the British suffragette movement, as reflected in Glynis Johns’ dizzy performance.

And it’s distinctly odd that the dramatic climax of the film comes when little Michael can’t be talked into investing his pocket-money tuppence in his father’s bank because he’d rather spend it to feed hungry pigeons. We’re meant to be squarely on Michael’s side, but since when is Disney (the new owner of Fox Studios and pretty much half of Hollywood) opposed to red-blooded financial investment? 

But finally, who cares? It’s lovely to enjoy a jolly ‘oliday with Mary Poppins. And the message that childhood is fleeting is something of which we could all use a reminder.

Galileo Blasts Off for Mercury (Freddie, That Is)

When I was in Cuba last December, our group enjoyed hearing a wonderful choir. At a recent music festival, we were told, they had performed Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Did they know there was a new American movie by that name? “Oh yes,” said the choir director. “But it hasn’t yet arrived in The Package.”  The Package (or “El Pacquete Semanal”) is a collection of digital materials—American soap operas, movies, pop music, and the like—that since 2008 has been sold each week on the Cuban underground as a substitute for broadband internet. The source of these compilations is apparently unknown, but some theorize it is actually the Cuban government, making a buck while winking at the notion of revolutionary cultural purity.

I wonder what Fidel Castro would have thought of Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of a Zanzibar-born Parsi who, having changed his name to Freddie Mercury, became an English rock god before dying of AIDS. I know I personally enjoyed the film, but it flunked my acid test for greatness: I rarely thought about it the following day.

Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, is one of eight Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 2018. Which puts it in the company of such intensely artful, deeply imaginative films as Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, and BlacKkKlansman. (The idiosyncratic spelling of that last, much as I admired it, is slowing driving me crazy.) Like Vice, Bohemian Rhapsody is a biopic, shining a light on an influential figure of the recent past.  Like A Star is Born, it chronicles the goings-on of the pop music industry. Like Green Book, it touches on the plight of an outsider whose musical gifts allow him to transcend the usual restrictions placed on others of his kind.

Much of the negative press about Bohemian Rhapsody—and there has been a great deal—involves snarky insinuations that this film has falsified the twists and turns of Mercury’s life and musical career. I did not grow up in the era of Queen, and so I can’t pretend to know what is accurate and what is not. Perhaps the details of the story we see on screen are as bogus as star Rami Malek’s prosthetic teeth. The fact that actual Queen bandsmen Brian May and Roger Taylor have executive music producer credits on the film may be what’s keeping the band’s story seeming so remarkably benign, even despite the lead singer’s sexual and other shenanigans. (Surely this is the most supportive group of sidemen ever captured on film.) By contrast, the role of Mary Austin, Mercury’s once-girlfriend and lifelong best friend, is a sort of mysterious blank; though Mary, as portrayed by the lovely Lucy Boynton, remains sympathetic, there’s no clear sense of what keeps her around throughout the years. The events depicted in Bohemian Rhapsody fall into a conventional sort of “and then I wrote” progression, but no one can deny that Malek’s portrayal of Mercury has an energy and a boldness that brings it alive. Will he be honored with an Oscar as the year’s best actor? Signs point to yes.

I can’t leave the topic without pointing out that the members of Queen, unlike such earlier rockers as the Beatles, were not scruffy lads from blue-collar homes but rather middle-class youngsters with college degrees. Guitarist Brian May, for one, earned a PhD in astrophysics, and served as a science team collaborator with NASA’s New Horizons mission. Not only did he contribute his scientific perspective; he also (natch!) wrote a song honoring the probe that was on its way to Pluto. Too bad it wasn’t heading for Mercury.