An Appreciation of “Mary Poppins Returns”

For my friend Karen: 

I missed my Gram. I could still sort of remember her among the things she left behind. I’d sit in her rocking chair whenever I could. I’d make paper airplanes like we used to do together. It wasn’t the same. I couldn’t imagine her alive again in my mind. Not seeing her there just reminded me how gone she was which just made me even sadder.  I missed the person I was before school happened, too, before the very first day when I realized I not only looked different from all the other kids but I WAS different. I couldn’t seem to keep anything in my head the way the teachers tried to teach it either. I missed the person I was before they had sent me home with report cards that told my parents that they should make me “try harder.” I was trying as hard as I could. Even worse was the note that said I didn’t have any “aptitude for music” when up until that moment that had been the only thing I did best. I missed the way the world was before our President got shot, too.

Not counting rockets with people on them getting out into space, Tomorrowland wasn’t how it should have been at all either. It wasn’t anything like how Walt Disney described it. But that still left all his other imaginery worlds that I’d literally been born to explore -the ones that had been made specially for every child growing up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.  Director Ang Lee once said: “I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.” My first movies were “Peter Pan” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” The TV characters in “Zorro,” “Long John Silver” and “Mickey Mouse Club” were like part of my family. The Disney musical language that spoke of and for them was the first language of my own heart. 

But then I had to miss all of them too, when the movies came and went and the TV shows got canceled. How I’d looked forward to seeing them all again in the new Disney movie “Babes in Toyland.” It had nearly everyone I’d come to know and love in it. But then THEY weren’t as they should have been either. My beloved ‘Scarecrow’ from “Wizard of Oz” was greedy and cruel. “Bernardo” and his “Sergeant” from Zorro were gleeful murderers who “won’t be happy until they get” whatever they wanted. Annette Funicello had the same trouble with arithmetic that I did but didn’t seem to care. She was about to lose her home because of it, but only sang emptily about numbers not making sense as if it didn’t really matter!  It mattered a lot to me!

Taking walks in the woods wasn’t the same without my Grampy there to be with either, it just reminded me that he was gone, too. In ‘Toyland’ you couldn’t even take a walk in the woods without being musically menaced by the trees!! Even worse, sweet grandfatherly Ed Wynn, someone not even “Twilight Zone” could make menacing, had become mean and selfish -all at poor, smart-but-dumb Tommy Kirk’s expense. All the good guys were like me in some weird, dissatisfying way. All the bad guys, the imaginary people I’d grown up relying on to love had turned treacherous, selfish and cruel. 

If there was one word to sum up the lesson “Babes in Toyland” taught me it was ‘sarcasm.’ Learning its meaning may have helped me understand the difference between real life and stagecraft, but it left me with what seemed like my last childhood refuge in ruins. I was too young at 9 years old to feel so old or so betrayed. School wasn’t what it should have been. Life wasn’t what it was supposed to be. People, even parents and teachers, couldn’t be relied upon to be wise or even care as they should. But worse than all of that was grandparents could die… and did. 

A year later things were a little better but still not better enough. My other, very British, Grammy (who’d been an upstairs maid in England but had “ALWAYS wanted to be a nanny”) had come to live with us. She couldn’t wait to take her only granddaughter to see “Mary Poppins.”

But seeing Ed Wynn’s name listed in the cast only reminded of “Toyland” and I literally sank into my seat. I girded myself to keep in mind that Walt Disney couldn’t be trusted to be what he should be either, which made me angry all over again, then resentful, than guilty for feeling that way. 

I wanted, needed to be reminded of something else, of something, by something, just something else —reminded that there was more to being me than just being disappointed.  Luckily for me, beyond what can be taught or even dreamt of, not simply that practically perfect ‘middle way’ one might pray for, there is the ‘delightful way’ of Poppinsian philosophy. That’s what was at the heart of the movie I’d been taken to see. It gave me hope that even if all those ‘should-be’s’ weren’t -the ones within me, within my family, even the world at large- they could still all be looked at in a different way. Even if time never would remedy all my young ills, a change in the wind of my attitude very well might. And even if it didn’t, flying a kite in that fresh breeze would make all of it that much easier to bear. There is nothing more true to life than a good fantasy. It’s sweet medicine for realities that can indeed be bitter without its balm. 

The movie gave me a special way to appreciate the Gram I still had by my side, my very own Mary Poppins, with whom I still could wander and wonder and laugh. But it also gifted me with a way to remember the Grammy that I’d lost. As luck would have it, Jane Darwell could have been that grandmother’s twin. Her ‘Bird Woman’ gave me a place to find my lost Gram whenever I needed her. Her song somehow made proud, even sweet, how she was missed. There was something even grand about it. The very music of what ‘should be’ whether it is or isn’t, especially when in a minor key. Its grandness opened my blind mind’s eye and heart again to how much she and music itself were still a part of me. I would never misplace that love again no matter the circumstance or what anybody else thought or said about it. It’s the place where I’ve always been able to find my thoughts and memories ever since, like my Gram herself, sitting at the steps of Heaven calling me to never stop “feeding the birds.”

So it was with some misgivings that I “Returned” to your version of “Mary Poppins.” I did not want to be disappointed, and gratefully, I wasn’t in any way. You’ve simply shepherded a whole new vocabulary safely into the same canon, one that I’m sure will guide still more children (no matter how old they are) safely back to their hearts’ imaginations just as the original once did for me.  Thank you David Magee, Rob Marshall, John DeLuca, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Cast & Crew All for illuminarying the way!