The return of Mary Poppins: Apology of nostalgia | Culture
With Mary Poppins, family film of 1964 directed by Robert Stevenson, something curious happens: it is at the same time one of the paradigms of stale and sweetened cinema, outside of its time and its society, against which shortly after the radical generation of directors of the New Hollywood (and another group of veterans wanting to evolve), the one of the tranquil bikers and the wild bulls, and exemplary nostalgic model of the childhood, of a cinema perhaps disappeared in combat, that was feeding successive generations of children in front of the television on a rainy weekend afternoon.
THE RETURN OF MARY POPPINS
Address: Rob Marshall.
Interpreters: Emily Blunt, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Gender: musical. USA, 2018
Duration: 130 minutes
The paradox, which almost has more to do with a personal process than with the strictly cinematographic, returns to become flesh with its late sequel, The return of Mary Poppins, that arrives 54 years later with exact tone and formal style, as if time and cinema had stopped, as a harbinger of "what is to come" (read singing). A fact that speaks so much of the null risk capacity of the film, credited to the longing for a few days that never return for adults, as the conviction that there is no need to change what, in spirit, has been the work of head of childhood decade after decade.
Directed with their usual neatness and impersonality by the experienced Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine), and protected in its history by a couple of burning issues, the excesses of banks and evictions, and the necessary feminist demands, The return of Mary Poppins It is very similar in structure to the original and, instead of modernizing technically, has preferred to maintain a retro style in its combination of real action and traditional animation.
Meanwhile, the new songs of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman have advanced between little and nothing, and the multitudinous numbers of dance, presumably more spectacular, are far in musical, choreographic and cinematographic quality of those of the best representations of the genre of those years sixty, and there the Oliver! by Carol Reed remains unsurpassed. So we must entrust ourselves to the memory, the presence of nonagenarian Dick Van Dyke, and his new faces: an impeccable Emily Blunt in the gesture but far below the vocal quality of Julie Andrews, and an emerging and renowned Lin-Manuel Miranda , perfect in the songs but with a face without a hint of charisma for the camera.
