Nanny McPhee

Nanny McPhee
Some will obviously want to compare it to Mary Poppins or any number of other “kiddy tales with a nanny”. I can’t speak about many of those other ones but I CAN say that comparing it to Mary Poppins Is unfair. Mary Poppins was about a nanny who came into a family that was whole but the parents were just too busy to watch the kids. The kids, themselves, weren’t “bad”… just bored and lazy. Mary Poppins comes in and uses kindness and love to help the whole family grow together and learn they need each other.
Nanny McPhee is a kiddy version of Freddy Kreuger!! She uses torture and intimidation to get the attention of some truly despicable children and only once they begin to BEHAVE does she show any sign of kindness to them. Had the story NOT established just how BAD these little brats are, parents would be upset about what McPhee does.
Wait.. let me stop for a second and say that I enjoyed this. It was better than some of the other blatantly kiddy crap that’s come down the pipeline lately. It is what Lemony Snickett SHOULD’VE been: enjoyable and endearing. The characters are mostly kid stereotypes on the surface but their own knowledge of themselves set them apart by the middle of the tale. They KNOW they’re bad and often do the bad things INTENTIONALLY. They KNOW right from wrong and are making conscious choices to BE bad. We see this in the quieter moments when the children are alone together and discuss plans. They are a community with a leader (the eldest son) and the mother figure (eldest daughter), the brain, the cutie-pie, the baby and so one. The kids are nearly pitch perfect and manage some rather impressive subtleties in their acting that are damn impressive.
The adults aren’t pushovers either. All the characters are there for a reason and not one of them is JUST for laughs. If the character is in it for more than five minutes, there is a REASON for it. This, sadly, means it doesn’t have the low brow humor that most kiddie movies throw in to make the kids in the audience giggle (not a LOT of it, anyway) and CAN come off as a bit too dull. Some kids in the audience may not stick with it which is too bad for them. The message of family and kindness actually feels more genuine in THIS than in Poppins.
Emma Thompson shows why she was once THE actress to get in a movie. She is a true joy as McPhee, a nanny/witch/wickedly wonderful woman. Every moment she is on screen you can just FEEL that the character is on a mission and will not back down. You can see her thinking and planning and scheming. You know that even when she seems to give in to the children, it’s merely a ploy to get them off guard for the nasty punishment on the way. For example, when the kids try to play sick with measles, she acts as compassionate and worried as the kids were hoping and even goes so far as to agree that they SHOULD stay in bed. The kids are all excited until they realize they CAN’T get out of bed. Her and her magics slowly change not only the children but their father who is so worried about keeping the family together he forgets that there is more to it than just simply keeping them all in the same house. She also affects the maid who believes she needs an education and all the trappings of status to get the attention of the man she loves when all she had to do was get his attention.
There are some disturbing images for the wee small kids (dead body since the dad is a mortician, subtle sex talk, nasty pranks and threatened cannibalism) but with good parenting, I think they could handle it. And if the kid is a brat, don’t take them!! Go see it yourself and try to see what can be applied at home! But for god’s sake don’t bring them so they can ruin the experience for everyone else!!