...an invitation to surrender to Emma Thompson's exaggerations.
Emma Thompson just isn't like the rest of us. The woman who created Nanny McPhee
Returns is the same one who won an Oscar for Howards End and adapted Sense and
Sensibility for the screen. Is that possible? Of course. This is Emma Thompson.
She is a woman who can act, direct, and write with the best of her peers in any
one of those fields. She studied English literature at Cambridge where she
discovered her Monty Python roots in the Footlights group. She is at home in
comedy and drama, in Hollywood and independent film, on stage and television.
One of her abundant talents lies in the realm of slapstick comedy where her
career began. And here she is with Nanny McPhee Returns.
What Thompson
gives us here is a fable that uses animals, birds (watch that crow!), and
villainous humans to score moral points in a landscape strewn with wildflowers
and barley fields that are tended by a wife (Maggie Gyllenhaal) whose husband is
off at war. Isabel's perfect children are helping her raise piglets who will be
the currency that will allow them to keep the tractor that in turn will let them
keep the farm until the beloved husband/father returns. This is a premise simple
enough for very young children to grasp and for adults to transpose into larger
lessons if they're of a mind to. The good guys are Isabel and her children
Megsie (Lil Woods), Norman (Asa Butterfield), and Vincent (Oscar Steer). The
villains are Uncle Phil (Rhys Ifans), a weakling determined to sell the farm,
and Celia (Rosie Taylor-Ritson) and Cyril (Eros Vlahos), the spoiled rotten city
cousins who arrive for a prolonged stay in a chauffeur driven London Limo. Oh
yes, and there's Nanny McPhee.
Nanny, who
has been trained by the military, lives under a controlling notion: "when you
need me but don't want me, I must stay; when you want me but no longer need me,
I must go." She arrives on foot across the fields, armed with supernatural
powers of punishment (a whomp of her cane to the floor stops the action cold)
and the five principles of this fable: stop fighting; share nicely; help each
other; be brave; have faith. All this is painted in broad slapstick, but you
have a hard heart if Asa Butterfield's Norman doesn't bring a tear to your eye
at least once.
How better to
spice up the fun than to have Maggie Smith play a loony old gal and Ralph
Fiennes as the ice cold father of the awful cousins? Maggie Gyllenhaal must wear
a brave smile from start to finish, the kids are excellent actors, and Emma
Thompson's Nanny McPhee is appropriately stern and magical. What really seals
the compact between audience and movie though, is Emma Thompson's implicit
invitation to surrender entirely to her exaggerations. My suggestion would be
that you grab your favorite five year old and go together.
Copyright (c) Illusion