Family Film Friday: Mary Poppins

Sure, this movie is sweet, but it's also crazy.  I think the 60s may have actually started here.  After all, the movie features magic, flying, jumping into pictures, and people laughing so hard they start floating.  I doubt that Walt Disney was giving nods to the drug culture, but this is one strange movie.

But it's also one of my favorites, and it's one of those movies that gives me a lump in my throat every time I watch it.  It always happens at the same scene.  As George Banks makes his way to the bank through The City in London, meandering through the fog, and contemplating his professional demise, I always get choked up.  He has realized that he has thrown away his children's childhood thus far, and he sees that enjoying their fleeting youth should be more important than compound interest and balance sheets.

Like many other movies, this is a film that improves as one revisits upon growing older.  It remains a wonderful movie for children.  The blend of animation and live action entrances them.  The songs are always captivating to them.  And the presence of children as main characters in the movie give children something with which they can connect.  As I grew older, I became more and more impressed with the script.  The dialogue is unbelievably sophisticated, and the lyrics of the songs are genius.  "It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion, are scrubbed and tubbed, and adequately fed.  And so I pat them on the head, and send them off to bed...Lordly is the life I lead."   These lyrics capture George Banks' arrogance and detachment. 

Into this controlled world flies (literally) the nanny Mary Poppins to save the family and create upheaval.  This role introduced Julie Andrews to film going audiences.  She won a best actress Oscar for it, and it is not hard to see why.  She creates a character who is at once compassionate, self righteous, and mysterious.  Who is this woman who flies in from the clouds, dispenses with other working class nannies, and overturns the social structure of the Banks family?  And then, who is this Bert character (a wonderful Dick Van Dyke), who is the only person who seems to know what on earth is going on with this woman?  Mary Poppins (with Bert) are intent on mending the troubled Banks household, and making sure that both parents (the mother is equally distracted by the suffragette movement) come to pay attention to their children.  Along the way, this normal domestic story is seasoned with wondrous sights like a march upon the rooftops of London.

This is one of those few movies that has always been with me.  When I went to London for the first time, I couldn't help but think of the silly bird woman when I visited St. Paul's Cathedral.  This movie got under my skin way back when I was a child.  I am happy to report that it is still there.