Mary Poppins (Disney version) on good form

I'm starting to long for an opportunity to rubbish something. It feels like my recent blog posts have been comparatively benevolent, and it's a long time since I had a chance to tear a film, book or TV series to ribbons. Maybe the TV adaptation of His Dark Materials will oblige me by and by - the first episode was certainly dire, but the second, annoyingly, picked itself up a bit. I'll have to hold my fire for now. Meanwhile, I watched Mary Poppins Returns this weekend and found myself yet again enjoying something a great deal more than I expected.

I didn't think I'd like this film much at all, to be honest. I'd seen a scathing Youtube review of it, and it did seem like a rip-off of a franchise which I wasn't sure Disney handled very well to begin with. Yet from the get-go, I was charmed by the catchy songs, the adventures Mary Poppins takes the new generation of Banks children on and Mary herself as played by Emily Blunt. Yes, you can say the film's derivative - the numbers and adventures echo those in the first film in a number of ways - but for some reason this didn't really bother me. I had a good time for two solid hours without feeling that the story dragged.

Maybe the derivative aspect doesn't irritate me exactly because I don't quite consider the first Mary Poppins film a timeless classic. I rewatched it shortly after watching Saving Mr Banks and I liked it fine. For reasons explained in my Saving Mr Banks post, however, I don't see the Disney version of Mary Poppins as the "real" Mary Poppins - she's a far cry from the books (which, admittedly, I only remember very dimly). So as Julie Andrews was already not the Mary Poppins of my childhood, it doesn't feel like heresy to regard Emily Blunt as another manifestation of this particular version of Mary - Disney Mary. In some ways there's even a little more of the strict nanny about Blunt than Andrews, so she's a smidgeon closer to the book Mary, but not by much. Mary Poppins Returns sets out to deliver on the Disney Mary front - good songs, check; magical adventures, one of which includes animated characters, check (and where else do you get to see 2-D animation in the classic old Disney vein nowadays?); pretty uncontentious life lessons, check; heartwarming moments, check - and it does it well. There's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned.

My main criticism of Mary Poppins Returns relates, unsurprisingly, to its banker villain, played by Colin Firth. To see Firth deadpanning is always fun, but the part he's given is meagre to say the least. The main problem to overcome in the film is that Michael Banks, now grown up, owes the bank money, and will get his house repossessed if he doesn't repay the loan within a few days. The problem will go away if he can show that he was left shares in the bank by his father, as they are worth enough to settle the loan comfortably.

Now Firth's character Wilkins goes as far as to destroy the bank's records of the shares owned by the late George Banks, because for some reason he really wants that house rather than the loan paid in cash. But why? What banker would rather repossess houses than get his money back? Wilkins acts not only heartlessly, but stupidly and downright illegally. On no level does this display good business sense - no wonder his aged uncle sacks him in the end.

True, a Mary Poppins film isn't supposed to give a realistic picture of economic matters. But what bugs me is that Wilkins isn't given any motive at all, besides being evil. I could have bought an exaggerated, whimsical explanation, in tone with the story. He could have had a grudge against the Banks family (maybe the Banks children were always held up to him as shining examples by his tiresome uncles?) or some grandiose ideas about real estate being the Big Future and the only thing to keep the bank afloat during the great slump. It didn't have to be a good motive, as long as there was one.

Luckily, one of the bankers from the original story is reintroduced at the end, in time to reassure us that the film doesn't have some confused All Bankers Are Evil agenda. The bankers in the original film weren't evil: they meant well, and honestly thought they were helping Michael when they tried to persuade him to invest his penny rather than squander it on bird food. In a head-scratching twist from the new film, they weren't half wrong, either. They simply had a different outlook than the one Mary Poppins was trying to promote, and that's fair enough.

So, yes, the whole bank plot could have been better handled. But apart from that, Mary Poppins Returns is fun and occasionally moving escapism (I blubbed once or twice). Plus it's had me humming "The Cover is not the Book" tunelessly ever since I saw it.