Movie Review: Nanny McPhee Returns

Emma Thompson, who wrote and stars in this weekend’s “Nanny McPhee Returns,” has personal experience with a frightening nanny figure. “I had an evil au pair from Poland once who stole my sweets after I’d had my tonsils out when I was seven,” she told me, “I had my face slapped without permission from my parents. So I ran away with my sister around the corner for a bit. And then came back home again.”

Thompson, speaking from Atlanta where she was promoting the film, laughed at the memory. “Yes. We survived. It wasn’t Kindertransport.” (Referring to the harrowing trip escape arranged for some desperate children to escape the Holocaust.) In fact, most of her experiences were far better than the Polish Persecutor, “We didn’t have nannies. We had au pairs because my parents were actors and they didn’t have much money so au pairs were a great deal cheaper. My mother said she ended up looking after them greatly more than she ever had to look after us. Some of them were lovely. And some of them weren’t.”

Creating Nanny McPhee, who arrives ugly but becomes beautiful as the children learn her wisdom, flows naturally. “I like her mischief and her wisdom and her patience,” Thompson said, “And the fact she has a sort of madness about her. She comes and everything goes crazy and it’s fun and funny and then she has to go. It makes for a very emotionally profound feeling.”

“Nanny McPhee Returns” is not a continuation of “Nanny McPhee,” she explained, “This movie is not a sequel in the sense it’s got no other character from the first movie except nanny McPhee. It’s a new story and this time it’s a sort of harried multitasking mother. Her husband is at war, fighting, and it’s about the fact that some posh children come to stay and this terrible war breaks out between these two groups of children.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Isabel Green, a mother of three trying to hold things together while her beloved husband is off at war. She works in a shop with a delightfully senile old lady (a wonderful bit part by Dame Maggie Smith) and tries to keep her ne’er do well brother-in-law from selling the farm. When the city cousins come to escape London bombing, Isabel has five bickering, screaming, biting, kicking hellions on her hands. That’s when Nanny McPhee shows up.

Nanny McPhee bangs her crooked stick and magical things happen. The children must learn five lessons, staring with every parent’s favorite, “Stop fighting.”  When the lessons are complete, Nanny McPhee must go.

The film packs a surprising emotional punch. The family lives in an era that looks vaguely like World War II and one day receives the telegram they’d been fearing. Father has been killed in action. Or has he?

Maggie Gyllenhaal is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors. She radiates in the role. The children are quite good as well, especially Eros Vlahos as the sarcastic and snotty city kid Cyril. Kids will love the magical whimsy, much of it involving farm animals, and parents will find themselves sucked in as well. The world of the film radiates warmth and comfort in a particularly English way. You sense the Green family farm is just around the corner from Frodo’s Shire.

Best of all, however, is how Nanny McPhee guides children to learn to solve their problems and contribute to society. Stop fighting is just the first lesson. Others include sharing joyfully, being brave, and taking leaps of faith. These are lessons we all want our children to learn, although perhaps we don’t have water ballet pigs to help teach them as Nanny McPhee does.

For Emma Thompson, it all comes down to bringing families together. “When I’ve seen a movie I want to walk out feeling different. I want to feel something different to what I felt when I walked in. More hopeful or happier or more liable to talk to your neighbors. What I would love [children and parents] to do is to want to go out and talk about it. To go and share a pizza and say, ‘What did you think about it? What did you like the best?’ That’s the whole point of a really good movie, isn’t it? Something to be shared.”

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