While Emily Blunt has stated time and again that Mary Poppins Returns is more “homage” to the original than anything else, it has to be said that she very much tries her best to emulate the woman we will forever associate with the mythical creature that is Mary Poppins: Julie Andrews. One way that she doesn’t quite achieve the task of filling these dainty yet large shoes is in her almost cruel gaslighting of the latest generation of children to the Banks family, John (Nathanael Saleh), Annabel (Pixie Davies) and Georgie (Joel Dawson). As the progeny of Michael (Ben Whishaw), whom she cared for, in addition to his sister, Jane (Emily Mortimer), Mary should perhaps feel something of a natural affinity and protectiveness toward them, but instead, she seems to see fit to toy with their brains like a cat batting a ball of yarn back and forth.
It all starts from the moment she descends upon the land near Cherry Tree Lane (where David Magee–also known for adapting the fantastical story of J. M. Barrie into 2004’s Finding Neverland–begins our story during “The Great Slump”). As Georgie defies orders from the stodgy official guarding the grass from being stepped on to chase after the kite that his father was so quick to throw out in his state of hopelessness and cursing broken dreams, Mary rides it down to the children to assume immediate familiarity with them. A perfect stranger ordering them around! Not that the now grown lamplighter/unofficial narrator of the tale Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), former apprentice to Bert (Dick Van Dyke, later to make a cameo as a decrepit old coot of a bank owner), doesn’t vouch for Mary as a means to get the children to trust her.
But then, how can anyone trust a woman who is so quick to make bath-taking the first item of business when, for fuck’s sake, there’s a depression on and wasting water so frivolously seems a costly shame? But Mary’s decadence in the face of economic hardship is just one of the many shoddy, at best, examples she sets for her charges (though some would say it’s important to maintain a rosy attitude during dreary times, the only people who do that in real life tend to be vapid twats in the vein of the Kardashian family). What’s more, after she gets the kids all optimistic and believing in magic again after sending them into the deep recesses of the underwater world of their bathtub (during which she sings, “So, perhaps we’ve learned when day is done/Some stuff and nonsense could be fun/Can you imagine that?”), she firmly denies anything of the sort ever happened to their father and aunt, insisting, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” of Annabel’s exclamations. It’s pretty fucked up psychological warfare, even if Mary might claim to be doing it because she knows adults are too narrow-minded to believe in anything illogical (“wisdom” John has already been brainwashed with as he touts, “If it doesn’t make sense, it can’t be true”–how da fuck you explain Trump as current president then?).
Directed by Rob Marshall (who has made something of a name for himself as a director of musicals–starting from his 2002 debut, Chicago), Mary Poppins Returns remains faithful to the notion of always believing in the idea that: “Everything is possible, even the impossible.” And also believing that if you, as a child, ever even attempt to share your acid trip-tinged worldview with adults, you will be summarily met with nothing but incredulity and scolding. It’s sure to condition a kid to never want to share anything whatsoever with their parent, causing them to retreat entirely into themselves and likely devolve into some James McAvoy in Split type in their adulthood. But anyway, about Mary Poppins contributing to that split personality: she’s rather a psychopath for not just corroborating these kids’ rehashings of the very things she hath brought upon them.
Like when they accidentally break their deceased mother’s “priceless” Royal Doulton bowl as they argue whether or not to sell it in order to save their house from being repossessed by the bank. Entering upon the aftermath of the chipped bowl, Mary suddenly sees fit to not only 1) become a walking one-woman advertisement for Royal Doulton, singing “The Royal Doulton Music Hall” as we’re given an old lady’s wet dream of product placement and 2) give the children an even more fantastical experience by going inside the exterior of the bowl only to tell them when they wake up screaming from the terror of the near kidnapping of Georgie by a cartoon wolf meant to embody the callous president of the bank, William Wilkins (Colin Firth, never convincing as a villain), that it was just a nightmare. Yes, just a nightmare that they all had at the same exact time. Totally plausible.
As she takes advantage of the malleable minds (a.k.a. feeble brains) of the impressionable young, Mary’s own objective in life seems to be to remain like one of J. M. Barrie’s Lost Boys, forever trapped in a Neverland of fun and irresponsibility. In her defense, of course, why would anyone want to dabble too much in reality when it renders former painters like Michael into begrudging bankers? When one of his children still tries to point out, “But you’re not a banker, you’re a painter,” Michael lifelessly replies, “Well, painters don’t make money, not these days.” Still true.
Occasionally, Mary, like those that orbit her alternate universe, seems to admit that the world is a fairly fucked up milieu. Mainly when she visits her cousin, Tatiana Antanasia Cositori Topotrepolovsky, so that Meryl Streep can have some sort of part in this film. Forgetting that coming on the second Wednesday of the month finds Topsy inexplicably upside down, Mary asserts that this is no excuse for her to not repair the Royal Doulton bowl (again with the damned Royal Doulton bowl), remarking, “When the world turns upside down, the best thing is to turn right alongside with it.” In short, in America, that means become a white supremacist. Or, better yet, simply tell yourself that there’s “Nowhere to Go But Up” as everyone else does while riding Angela Lansbury’s (forever the ultimate “frivolous woman“) magical balloons into the sky. Call it the collective delusion imparted upon them by Mary Poppins.
In many respects, the importance of time period to the story of Mary Poppins is the only way to keep her supernatural powers paired with a Pollyanna outlook (obviously ripped off by Mary) afloat–otherwise she’d go the same route as Shary Bobbins with the average family of the present (British or not). On that note, the “miraculous” investment of Michael’s tuppence (which Mary recklessly insisted he use to buy a bag to feed the birds with instead of put into the bank to grow interest) is just one of the many impracticalities of the Mary Poppins Gaslighting Project. Perfected to a tee by this twenty-first century version that seems right in keeping with the climate of “fake news.”
