Entertaiment

Nanny McPhee – A Must-See for Everyone
By Orson Scott Card

Don’t even think about not going to see Nanny McPhee.  If you’ve been good, then this movie will be your reward.  And if you’ve been naughty – well, you need Nanny McPhee more than anybody.

The story sounds like predictable children’s-literature material: A widower (Colin Firth) has seven deliberately awful children, whose appalling antics are designed to get the thing they cannot have: Father’s attention, and life back to normal.

Meanwhile, wealthy Great Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury) has vowed to discontinue the monthly allowance that the family lives on unless Father marries before the end of the month.  Since his work as a mortician would not begin to pay the rent, this would lead to the children being split up and put in orphanages while Father went to debtors’ prison.

Unfortunately, he has not told the children this, so when he brings home the only woman he has a chance of marrying in such a short time (played to disgusting perfection by Celia Imrie), they do their best to – well, not quite kill her, but close enough, using the same kind of pranks they used on nannies, before the agency went out of business with the announcement that there are “no more nannies!”

It is into the midst of this turmoil that Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) inserts herself.  Her magical intervention is crucial in bringing the family back together, but she requires the children – and their father – to come up with their own solutions to their problems.

Based on the extravagant “Nurse Matilda” stories by Christianna Brand, which are virtually unknown in the U.S., the script (by the Oscar-winning Emma Thompson wearing her brilliant-writer hat) strikes a delicate balance between comic fantasy and serious, heartfelt storytelling.

Thompson is on record as saying that Nanny McPhee is something of a cross between The Sound of Music and Shane.  I can see her point, but in other ways it combines the wit and whimsy of the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) with the deep magic of the live-action Peter Pan (2003).

The script is matched by a setting that is at once lush and restrained.  The old house is a glorious architectural nightmare; but only the porch is painted in the vivid colors of comic fantasy.  There are layers of absurdity: The would-be wife brings garish new colors into the movie, which depart with her.

Yet the seemingly mismatched elements of the story are so delicately combined that to the audience it feels seamless.  We laugh; we cry.  And in the Saturday afternoon showing we attended, the audience burst into general applause at the end.  How often does that happen in the real world?

It helps that director Kirk Jones (whose only other credit is Waking Ned Devine) has drawn superb performances from everyone.  We expect no less from Emma Thompson (in my opinion the world’s best living actress), Colin Firth (who is embracing his maturity), and Angela Lansbury (who is, in her old age, giving what may be the best – and certainly is the funniest – performance of her career).

The children not only give engaging performances, you can tell them apart.  They put the Von Trapp family’s seven children to shame.  (Though, to be fair, these kids never had to wear curtains or sing “adieu, adieu, adieu, to yeu and yeu and yeu.”)

Those of us who loved Love, Actually and Tristan and Isolde will instantly recognize the oldest boy, Simon, played by the utterly real and winning Thomas Sangster.  He is joined by five other children who are differently attractive, impossible to believe in as siblings, and delightful.  (The baby is cute, but a grownup does the voice.)

Nanny McPhee herself is the deus ex machina of the film; at the heart of the story is the humble and sweet scullery maid, Evangeline, played by Kelly Macdonald, who has added much to movies like Elizabeth, Gosford Park, My Life So Far, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, but without making the leap into recognizability.  Let this movie put an end to her anonymity.