I went to see Mary Poppins Returns with an open mind and every intention of enjoying it. Sequels are always challenging and this was going to be more so given the original Mary Poppins was a significant cinematic achievement in it’s time, but I felt my expectations were reasonable and realistic. Mary Poppins was certainly a childhood favorite of mine but I haven’t watched it in years and didn’t plan to evaluate the new movie against the original — although that was ultimately inescapable.

And, in most respects, for me, the sequel delivered.

It’s a lovely visual work. I loved the sets, the costumes, the cinematography.

I enjoyed most of the dance scenes and the animated sequence inside the chipped china bowl.

I thought the songs were nice and would probably grow on me with repeated exposure — although, like many, I don’t think they have the catchy punch of the Mary Poppins score. But neither were they saccharine or teeth-clenchingly annoying.

I thought all the actors were terrific. They were well-cast and they did their respective bests, hampered only by the movie’s primary weakness: an incoherent jumble of a story.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to discuss the story, including the ending.

What is Mary Poppins Returns about?

The basic blurbs I’ve seen describing the plot are vague and after seeing the movie I now understand why.

The easy part: Mary Poppins Returns is about a troubled family helped by a magical nanny. The hard part? The details: what kind of family, what kind of trouble, and how does the magical nanny help?

At first blush those questions seem to be answered by the events in the movie but the feeling of vague dissatisfaction I felt after the movie caused me to analyze the story.

What are the story’s main elements?

We have grown-up Jane and Michael Banks, children in the first Mary Poppins. Now in their 30’s, Jane is single, lives alone and works as a Labor Organizer. It’s pre-war 1930’s and England is in a depression. Michael is an artist and part-time bank-teller with three children. His wife died some months ago. He, the children and long-time housekeeper/cook live in the same house Jane and Michael grew up in. The Banks parents from the first movie are presumably deceased.

Michael is still grieving for his dead wife, so much so that the children have taken over managing daily practicalities like budgeting and shopping. As the story opens two men arrive on the doorstep with a foreclosure notice. Michael’s wife’s illness had caused him to take out a loan for medical expenses from the bank his father so memorably worked for in Mary Poppins, and where Michael now works part-time in an effort to supplement his income since art work isn’t selling during the depression. He’s behind on loan payments, due, he explains, to the fact his wife always managed all that. No harm, no foul, though, just let him write a check for the total of the missed payments and the problem is solved. But no, he’s told he cannot simply catch up on three payments he must now pay the entire remaining loan balance or the bank will repossess his house.

Jane, the good sister and aunt, arrives, finds out about the situation and reminds Michael their father had left them shares in the bank and they ought to be worth enough to pay off the loan. Since we can’t have the story’s main difficulty solved ten minutes into the movie, there has to be a problem with the shares and this is where the plot, for me, began to disappoint.

The problem, you see, is neither Jane nor Michael know where the stock certificate, proving they own bank shares, is.

This piece of paper, with curly writing and gold edging, a document that represents a substantial sum of money, could be anywhere because…because Michael is an artist and we all know how impractical artists are? Because Jane is a Labor Organizer, too busy being an idealist to pay attention to sordid details like the location of a bank share certificate left to her and Michael, until a financial emergency arises? (It also struck me that the memory of these shares should reasonably have occurred when Micheal faced the mounting medical bills necessitating the loan, but we’ll let that pass.)

As Jane and Michael commence desperate searching through desks and trunks and the attic where Michael’s abandoned paintbrushes sit near piles of sketches, I found myself thinking the situation didn’t add up. I hate when reasonably intelligent characters get forced into idiocy as a plot device.

But okay, I told myself, this is a story about a magical nanny. I’m already expected to suspend my disbelief so why get fussy about a somewhat clumsy set-up?

We’ll accept these likable, intelligent, functioning adults haven’t bothered to keep tabs on their bank share certificate or, indeed, that Michael, undergoing a period of sustained financial stress, didn’t even recall the existence of the shares, until reminded about them by Jane, who also didn’t recall them earlier when Michael resorted to mortgaging the house.

Fine. Now all they have to do is find it.

Meanwhile, the children, three charming young actors, set off to get groceries and worry over the potential loss of their home. They’d like to help. They seem, in fact, like nice, well-meaning kids who are coping quite well with the loss of their mother. They aren’t tragic or miserable. But Mary Poppins is a nanny and nannies take care of kids and she’s magic which means she has more to offer than your average nanny and therefore the kids must have an outsized need so the potential loss of family home seems like a significant crisis and, bottom line, Mary Poppins arrives. (The crisis of the children’s Mother dying after a protracted illness didn’t qualify, apparently.)

Her arrival generates a series of plot problems which ultimately stem from a central, unanswered question: what is the purpose/point of Mary’s magic?

Magic is generally treated one of two ways in stories: either you’re given some kind of rationale for it’s existence and usage by certain characters, or you’re expected to accept that for some unexplained reason this being/group of beings has magical powers and others don’t, period. Either way, magic always presents hazards to writers because it’s hard to be consistent in it’s usage, or failure to use: “why does he use his powers this time but not that time?” Still, whether explained or not, magical elements need to be effectively woven into a plot, just like any other elements and in this, Mary Poppins Returns falls short.

Mary’s magic is used as a excuse for a bunch of charming visuals and animation that could exist in an entirely different movie — they have almost no relationship to the main storyline.

In addition, the magical events the children enjoy offer no lasting lessons, no learning, nothing they can take with them to help them live more effectively going forward. The best you can say is that they provide a few hours of cheering diversion for kids who, according to the needs of the plot, need cheering up.

So we have fantasy scenes and songs which are, in and of themselves, charming, cute, sometimes funny, well-choreographed, etc. Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda inhabit their respective roles quite well and the kids are winsome and likable. Meryl Streep has a good time with a, let’s face it, unnecessary scene that could have been cut from the movie without damaging the plot, but it exists in part as an homage to the wonderful I love to Laugh scene in the first Mary Poppins movie, and in part as a vehicle for one of the movies more specific “messages” — that things might look bad, but changing your point of view might enable you to see the bright side of problems. This is followed by The Light Fantastic, an elaborate song and dance scene featuring gas lamplighters and a general theme of keeping your chin up, summoning your own internal light to face troubles, being cheerful and fearless.

Now, I’m all for cheeriness. I think optimism is healthy. I think a bit of escapism helps people recharge. But if the main goal is raising the kids’ spirits you don’t really need a magical Nanny providing enchanted interludes — a day at an amusement park would work just as well. The magical powers that render Mary Poppins an extra-special Nanny are reduced to the spiritual equivalent of a hot-fudge sundae (pick your equivalent) or, for that matter, a stiff drink: an indulgence used to distract from problems for a short time. The effect of Mary’s magical experiences is so evanescent that Jane and Michael had forgotten Mary Poppins’ visit in their youths; they’d both decided they’d been dreaming. And one of Mary’s last lines in Mary Poppins Returns is that adults always forget the magic — by tomorrow they’d forget they’d been floating high over London courtesy of magic balloons.

There are some broad messages offered through the song lyrics. Underneath the London Sky tells us to count our blessings. Turning Turtle informs us things we see as bad can be seen as good if we employ a different point of view. The Light Fantastic seems to be saying when things suck just tell yourself they don’t because things always get better; also don’t give up in the face of troubles. The Place Where Lost Things Go addresses the loss of their mother and says, roughly, she’s not really gone, just invisible, alive inside of them. There’s Nowhere to Go But Up makes that point. Can You Imagine That tells us to have fun, enjoy ourselves, life is the journey, not the destination. A Cover is Not the Book tells us surfaces can be deceiving, dig deeper. Also be who you are.

All perfectly serviceable messages but once again they bear little relationship to the main plot elements beyond the bare notion that the Banks’ keep the house which means there’s a happy ending which means friendly lamplighters and magical nannies telling the kids to keep their chins up because there’s nowhere to go but up is shown to be good advice because everything works out.

But everything works out due to a series of absurdities.

The first absurdity already noted is Jane and Michael’s carelessness with the share certificate.

The certificate eventually turns up pasted to Michael’s old, torn kite, the kite he’d flown so happily with his father at the end of Mary Poppins. He’d found the kite, decrepit and forgotten, in the attic and discarded it along with a pile of sketches he’s decided are just so much detritus from his impractical past. He grabs a pile of sketches and puts them, with the kite, into the trash bin outside. Later his youngest son harvests one of the sketches, tearing it into pieces and pasting them as patches onto the kite, which he found being blown by the wind across the nearby park.

It is when the family is exiting their repossessed home for the last time, with a moving truck at the door, that Michael realizes the patches were from a sketch of his wife with the children, and, by gum, the sketch had been done on the back of the share certificate! How providential! But also, just how stupid and careless is Michael Banks? He sketched his family on the back of an extremely important document and didn’t notice the embossed gold because you know how insensitive artists are to paper and then, whilst desperately hunting for a certificate, doesn’t bother to look through stacks of paper, instead throwing them away!

Okay, well, here’s the certificate and all is well, right? Not yet. The villainous banker (Colin Firth) who knows perfectly well Jane and Michael own shares in the bank had destroyed the page in the big ledger with their names on it and demanded they produce their certificate no later than midnight. (This is because he’s a greedy banker.) They arrive with the pieces of the certificate but gosh darn the only piece missing is the signatures, rendering it insufficient! However the day is saved when the old but spry uncle of the villain who is actually head of the bank (Dick Van Dyke who is delightful) appears at the door in the nick of time to first, fire his nephew who’d been spreading the story that Dick was incompetent to run the bank, and second, to inform Michael and his family that all is well. It seems when Michael was a youngster he opened a savings account with a tuppence (this happens in the first Mary Poppins) and Dick has been investing that principle all these years and it has grown into a tidy sum that will more than cover Michael’s debt! (Dick is a good banker!)

When this happened, rather than basking in the glow of the villain routed and heroes saved, I found myself wondering how many more fortunes had Michael forgotten? And how was it Michael has never received, say, a bank statement in all these years? Especially given he actually works there?

Meanwhile, Dick’s appearance isn’t foreshadowed in any way so we’re to accept that the elderly man just knew to show up at midnight to save the day by telling his employee something his employee should have known anyway.

Grrrr.

Now, Mary uses her magic to enable the Banks’ to arrive a few minutes before midnight so they can meet the arbitrary deadline imposed by the evil banker. She floats to the top of Big Ben, the giant London clock, and with the purely physical, mundane, unmagical aide of Lin-Manual Miranda, moves the minute hand back five minutes. Other than that her presence and magical ability in no way contribute to the resolution of the of the story’s main problem. There’s a slight tie-in with the animated sequence in the broken bowl, wherein we meet an evil wolf. Confronted with the villainous banker, the youngest Banks boy associates him with the evil wolf and thus the children realize before their father does that the smiling banker is dishonest. But their realization doesn’t convince Michael nor change the ultimate outcome.

So Mary’s magic, enjoyable as it is, is superfluous to the story and as such, is something of a wasted resource.

Near the end, when Mary says the adults always forget, we get a glimpse of the story’s conflict with itself. The story seems to be preaching the value of imagination and optimism but other than repeating that it’s good to be optimistic in the face of troubles, it does nothing to prove the value of optimism with real resonance. Instead it presents a practical problem and resolves that through a creaky plot device, and one that, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis with it’s attendant wave of foreclosures, struck me as particularly tone-deaf. How is the Banks home saved? Why by having a nice banker investing money for you so that you have a surprise bank account when you need it! How comforting that would be to all those kids and their parents who lost their homes to foreclosure to muse on how great it would have been if they had had a nice banker who took a dollar from their Dad a couple of decades ago and turned it into a fortune! Alas, they didn’t, so unlike the Banks’ their stuff did get carted away in a moving truck.

At the point in the movie when the Banks are leaving their house I thought, “wow, maybe they’re going to be bold and have them actually lose the house and we’ll see them resiliently coping! Maybe now Mary and Jack will justify their presence in this story by offering genuine guidance during a difficult transition. Maybe Mary will start with magic but, ultimately, show Jane, Michael and the children they can summon their own strength, forge a new path for themselves, find joy in tough times.”

In other words, take the messages from the songs and put them to work. Some variation of that, I think, would have resulted in a much more satisfying movie.

Addendum

After seeing Mary Poppins Returns I read the original Mary Poppins novels by P.L. Travers.

Some notes:

P.L. Travers chose to leave the source of Mary’s “magic” unexplained. She flirts with ideas, implying Mary may be scion of a mythical group like Roman or Greek gods, or some pagan idea of nature gods, etc. She offers a few evocative ideas upon the birth of the fifth Banks child (in the books Jane and Micheal have two younger siblings – twins Barbara and John, and later, another baby sister).

But Travers doesn’t enlarge on her more mystical concepts – she offers them and moves on.

She also has her character, Mary Poppins continually refuse to explain anything with respect to how or why she does magical things. This frustrates Jane and Michael and, occasionally the much-tried Park Keeper – who seems to be the only adult surrounding the Banks family that notices the magical happenings. Occasionally other adults end up as participants in episodes but they seem to forget their experiences almost instantly.

 Mary also verbally denies the magical experiences she and the children have shared which confuses and sometimes angers Jane and Michael. Eventually Jane and Michael accept they will never receive an explanation from Mary Poppins, and they realize that while she’ll never verbally acknowledge her magic, she knows they know.

This refusal to explain ultimately weakens the books for me in that they lack an arc – they are collections of entertaining-enough and sometimes delightfully creative magical episodes that appear to have limited to no impact on the characters. Since we will not be told either from whence Mary comes, or why she comes, or from where her powers derive or why she comes and goes unexpectedly we have to process the events of the stories as individual happenings that are fun while they last, but that don’t build toward anything in particular.

Mary’s “value” to the Banks household seems to be much more her mundane accomplishments: she seems to keep the nursery clean, the children washed, fed, exercised and entertained. When she leaves the household falls into chaos. The children miss her, the house stops running smoothly, the Banks parents are upset. Then Mary returns, bringing with her order and calm and more magical interludes. The interludes are often a combination of puzzle and delight but their effects are fleeting. No one appears to learn anything much, either about the magical world or the mundane world.

Many people see the message (such as they are) of the books to be something along the lines of “appreciating the wonders of the world” or “the value of imagination” but I’m not sure how. Jane and Michael get to enjoy magical events but are constantly admonished to keep their adventures to themselves. We get to enjoy the imagination of P.L. Travers — I don’t want to diminish her accomplishments — but in the end I think her primary message is the rather melancholy conclusion that the world’s mysteries can only be known by a few because human beings cannot retain their knowledge of the mystic or magical. 

Having read the books I can see anyone wanting to make a Mary Poppins movie would feel compelled to graft an additional story on top of the source stories in order to generate an arc with a beginning, middle and end. I think the 1960 movie managed that task more successfully than Returns because it posited a set emotional/relationship problems to resolve rather than a practical problem. The writer’s were more ambitious in Mary Poppins Returns but less successful because the movie’s resolution requires an infusion, somehow, from somewhere, of cold hard cash and they resolve it through a series of unmagical unlikelihoods.

In the end, they took what, to me, is a source weakness and compounded it. The books are about journeys that have no destination — enjoy the journeys for themselves, not because they have any larger meaning or purpose. The movie tries to paste a destination onto an unrelated series of journeys, a destination that cannot be arrived at through Mary Poppins being Mary Poppins. They made the decision (I think rightly) to not have Mary Poppins deliver a fortune through magic, which would not have been satisfying. But they evidently couldn’t dream up a solution that might have been more “real” — splitting the difference by going for a sort-of-real solution which depends on smart people being stupid and business-people being un-businesslike, to work.

While P.L. Travers chose to only hint at the origins of Mary Poppins and the reason for her powers, the 1964 movie ignored explanations completely. What they did instead was fall back on the broadest and vaguest notions of magic as defined by 20th Century western popular culture. (It’s like Halloween, which modern Americans celebrate as a completely secular day on which we wear costumes and give candy to children. We don’t celebrate All Souls Day; we don’t pray for the dead; we don’t really believe ghosts come out on Halloween and most Americans couldn’t tell you where the holiday sprang from.)

In the movie “magic” means the ability to operate outside physical laws. Limits are undefined, powers are whatever-you-need, origins are murky at best or filled with contradictions at worst. Ordinary people are powerless against the magic-user; they exist in a world where some beings have extra-powers for no apparent reason and they don’t.