If you’re looking for a movie you can take the kids to, you won’t go wrong with Nanny McPhee Returns. McPhee is a Mary Poppins type of character who appears when she’s not wanted and leaves when her charges want her to stay -- reminiscent of Mary Poppins’ pronouncement that, “I shall stay only until the wind changes.”
Here’s what McPhee is about: Isabelle Green, a young British mother whose husband is off fighting World War II, is in dire straits: she’s woefully short of money, her son and daughter talk back to her, and she is being besieged by her brother, half-owner of the family farm in rural Britain. His nefarious desire is to get her to sell the family farm in a scheme designed to help him escape his gambling debts. At just the right moment the village oddball, a charming elderly lady played by Maggie Smith, subtly arranges for Nanny McPhee to swoop miraculously in and save the day. Isabelle, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is determined not to sell the farm, and her son Norman and daughter Megsie are even more so. Enter the children’s cousins, Cyril and Celia, two spoiled rich kids from London who have a ways to go before they can graduate from the brat stage.
McPhee is a no-nonsense but hilarious type of person who unabashedly informs the children what they will have to do rather than try to persuade them to like her. She is an ugly duckling with one long protruding tooth, lots of warts and moles, and a brusque (but underlyingly loving) manner. Like Mary Poppins, McPhee is a master of, for lack of a better word, what we’ll call magic – but somehow the magic is believable.
The plot is predictable, but enjoyably so. It turns out that the spoiled cousins have a reason for their obnoxiousness. In a riveting scene, Cyril, the male brat cousin, has an enlightening confrontation with his distant father in the war office in London, an encounter that is likely to lead to reconciliation.
The acting is solid, with strong performances by Gyllenhaal and Smith and an outstanding one by Emma Thompson as McPhee. The picture has just the right amount of tension and plot development to be satisfying. Its strongest suit is its theme: McPhee teaches all four children five lessons, the most important of which is to have faith. Now we could certainly argue that this faith isn’t necessarily faith in the Lord – and the picture certainly isn’t Christian in any explicit way – but somehow it’s consistent with Christian values. Interestingly, the more the children come to love McPhee, the more she loses her ugliness.
Bottom Line: Nanny McPhee Returns is a feel-good movie for people of all ages.
Film Rating: PG
My rating: 3 stars.
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