Looking for an unambitious subject for a pre-travel, pre-Christmas blog post, I decided to pick one of those "I really should give that a watch some day" films from one of my streaming services, watch it and then write something about it. There were a few options: underperforming, gritty versions of the Robin Hood and King Arthur legends respectively (theme: is grittiness really a good idea here?); a soupy Netflix Christmas romcom (theme: soupy Netflix Christmas romcoms); or the first Paddington film (theme: ideal for anglophiles?). Somehow, I ended up plumping for Paddington.
The story is simple. The titular cute bear makes his way to London from Darkest Peru after the death of his uncle (his aunt holes up in a retirement home for bears, which mercifully does exist and isn't a fib just to get her nephew to seize his chance). Years earlier, before the young bear was born, his aunt and uncle – who belong to an unusually intelligent type of bear – ran into and bonded with an explorer from England, which is why the aunt fondly imagines that a home can be found there.
The young bear finds London a lot less welcoming than he thought, but manages to get a room for the night with the Brown family, who give him the name Paddington after the station where he was found. Paddington, though well-spoken, is accident-prone, and Mr Brown is adamant that he can't stay, so Paddington tries to find the explorer who once visited his family and make a home with him. Mrs Brown is Paddington's kind-hearted champion, he eventually bonds with the children, and well, you can guess the rest.
The first half-hour or so, I wondered if I had made the wrong choice. Of course this is a children's film, but the plot is very standard nevertheless. Also, there's a lot of slapstick, something I didn't really care for even as a kid (at least not in live action), and even less now as a fuddy-duddy adult. When Paddington uses two of the family's toothbrushes to clean his ears, before flooding the bathroom, I shuddered and wished I had gone for the Christmas romcom instead.
What's not simply standard, though, is the script. From the start, a quirky humour shines through, like when the explorer names one of the bears after his beloved mother – and the other after a boxer he met in a bar. There are a lot of nice details like that. Another early example is when the competitively minded daughter learns Chinese and one of the stock phrases is: "I'm accused of insider trading. I need a lawyer".
The visual style is also very attractive: like the film as a whole, it aims for whimsical charm and succeeds. The doll's house in the Browns' attic becomes an overview of their house as Paddington writes about them to his aunt; later, the camera swoops in on the toy train of antiques dealer Mr Gruber and shows a scene from his childhood when, as one of the children of the Kindertransport, he was met in England by a stiff female relative. "My body had travelled fast", sighs Gruber, played by kindly-eccentric-man expert Jim Broadbent, "my heart took a little longer". It was about at this point in the film that I decided I enjoyed it after all.
This scene is an example of two other of the film's virtues: that it's stuffed to the gills with solid acting talent, and that it can be heartfelt when it needs to be. But it's the wit and the inventive takes on classic comic set pieces I enjoyed the most. Two bored security guards while away the time by guessing the content description of their packet of biscuits, taking a genuine interest in the amount of sugar and other ingredients. Mr Brown, disguised as a cleaning lady, catches the fancy of a guard – so far, so familiar. But then the situation gets increasingly surreal as Mr Brown tries to explain the discrepancies between himself and the cleaning lady's photo id (she clearly looks like a real menace).
Hugh Bonneville is a reliable comic foil to Paddington as Mr Brown and Sally Hawkins a charming Mrs Brown, but it's often the side characters who steal the show rather than the Brown family or even cute Ben Whishaw-voiced Paddington himself. I'll certainly check out Paddington 2 at leisure, but with an awareness that I need to get in touch with my inner twelve-year-old in order to truly appreciate it.
