Except for the fact that the characters don't break out into song at regular intervals, "Nanny McPhee" is a weird hybrid between "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" (hereafter to be referred to as MP and TSOM), with an uglied-up Emma Thompson replacing the anything-but-ugly Julie Andrews in the lead role.
Miss McPhee is a British nanny with magical powers who arrives unannounced at the doorstep of one Mr. Brown (MP), a widower with seven unruly children (TSOM) who, due to business and financial pressures (MP) and grief over his wife's death (TSOM), has been rather neglectful of his progeny of late (both MP and TSOM). The children have successfully driven away all the town's employable nannies with their precocity and unruly behavior (MP and TSOM), but could they have finally met their match in the mysterious Nanny McPhee? There's also a subplot about Brown bringing home an odious woman to be a new mother to the children and their attempts to sabotage the effort that has "The Sound of Music" written all over it. And the final scene is such an unabashed and shameless rip-off of the closing moments (albeit sans umbrellas and kites) of "Mary Poppins" that I can't believe there aren't grounds for a copyright-infringement lawsuit here.
Since "Nanny McPhee" has stolen virtually every one of its plot points from those two previously mentioned classics, it's hard not to weigh this film against the originals and to find "Nanny McPhee" wanting in every respect. This is a drab, cheerless film filled with overdrawn caricatures and unappealing visuals. Nanny McPhee, replete with uni-brow, hairy warts and a prominent buck tooth, is herself so physically repulsive that she is liable to give impressionable youngsters nightmares for months afterwards. And buried under all that restrictive and distracting makeup, Emma Thompson can't even begin to deliver anything like a full-bodied, well-rounded performance. Of course, since she herself wrote the screenplay (based on the books by Christianna Brand), she probably has no one to blame but herself for her predicament. Pity, instead, poor Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury, fine performers who seem to be marking time waiting for some better roles to come along.
My big question when it comes to "Nanny McPhee" is why settle for this cheap knock-off when the originals are readily available and so much better?
Miss McPhee is a British nanny with magical powers who arrives unannounced at the doorstep of one Mr. Brown (MP), a widower with seven unruly children (TSOM) who, due to business and financial pressures (MP) and grief over his wife's death (TSOM), has been rather neglectful of his progeny of late (both MP and TSOM). The children have successfully driven away all the town's employable nannies with their precocity and unruly behavior (MP and TSOM), but could they have finally met their match in the mysterious Nanny McPhee? There's also a subplot about Brown bringing home an odious woman to be a new mother to the children and their attempts to sabotage the effort that has "The Sound of Music" written all over it. And the final scene is such an unabashed and shameless rip-off of the closing moments (albeit sans umbrellas and kites) of "Mary Poppins" that I can't believe there aren't grounds for a copyright-infringement lawsuit here.
Since "Nanny McPhee" has stolen virtually every one of its plot points from those two previously mentioned classics, it's hard not to weigh this film against the originals and to find "Nanny McPhee" wanting in every respect. This is a drab, cheerless film filled with overdrawn caricatures and unappealing visuals. Nanny McPhee, replete with uni-brow, hairy warts and a prominent buck tooth, is herself so physically repulsive that she is liable to give impressionable youngsters nightmares for months afterwards. And buried under all that restrictive and distracting makeup, Emma Thompson can't even begin to deliver anything like a full-bodied, well-rounded performance. Of course, since she herself wrote the screenplay (based on the books by Christianna Brand), she probably has no one to blame but herself for her predicament. Pity, instead, poor Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury, fine performers who seem to be marking time waiting for some better roles to come along.
My big question when it comes to "Nanny McPhee" is why settle for this cheap knock-off when the originals are readily available and so much better?