Tweet

EMAIL

PRINT

Comments (0)

 1 of 3

Nanny McPhee Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for mild thematic elements, some rude humor and brief language) Genre: Family, Fantasy Theater release: January 27, 2006 by Universal Studios Directed by: Kirk Jones Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes Cast: Emma Thompson (Nanny McPhee), Colin Firth (Cedric Brown), Thomas Sangster (Simon Brown), Angela Lansbury (Great Aunt Adelaide), Kelly Macdonald (Evangeline), Celia Imrie (Selma Quickly), Imelda Staunton (Mrs. Blatherwick) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Buy this poster

"Behave or Beware." That's the tag line for Nanny McPhee, a movie about seven naughty children and the magical but ugly governess who sets them straight, and it perfectly captures the dark humor and ominous authority of Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda books on which the film was based. But somewhere along the way, the film loses sight of this theme, and it becomes a movie about something else entirely, with disappointing results.

Brand introduced this magical governess in a short story for the 1962 anthology Naughty Children, which she then expanded into a book two years later; it was followed by two sequels. These stories follow a basic template: There is a family with many, many children—one of the running gags is that the author keeps introducing the names of boys and girls we have not yet met—and because there are so many of these children, they don't have adequate adult supervision; and thus, when all other nurses and nannies have quit, it is up to the magical Nurse Matilda to come and make the children behave.

Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) has a word for the children

Usually, Nurse Matilda disciplines the children by making them continue in their bad behavior long after they have ceased to will it to continue. If, say, they have been gobbling their food too fast, she taps the floor with her big black stick and, next thing you know, the children can't stop eating; indeed, they eat until it hurts. Eventually, the children learn their lesson, and every time they do, Nurse Matilda—who looked rather ugly when she first arrived at their house—looks slightly less ugly than she did before. Good behavior does not only make the children better people, it allows them to see others in a better light, too.

Emma Thompson grew up on these stories and clearly loves them; she wrote the screenplay for Nanny McPhee and stars as its title character, a bulbous-nosed, hairy-warted crone with an enormous snaggletooth that hangs over her lower lip. The children naturally mock her at first, until they realize she isn't someone to be trifled with. She also gets fine support from director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), who keeps the activity at a funny, cartoonish pitch, and from composer Patrick Doyle (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), whose broad, sweeping music is practically a character in its own right, and almost steals the show.

Mr. Brown (Colin Firth) and baby Agatha get into a fine mess

On one level, Nanny McPhee is a fascinating symbol of the sort of authority that makes itself redundant by encouraging children and others to become truly mature people. Ominously, she tells the children, "When you need me, but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go." She tells the family that she intends to teach five lessons—to go to bed when told, to get up when told, and so on. Each act of collective obedience on the children's part makes Nanny McPhee—and, by extension, the authority she represents—more attractive to them, as her ugly features begin to disappear one at a time. But as the children shape up and internalize the lessons she teaches them, they also become increasingly less dependent on her authority and more confident in their own independence … which seemed to be Nanny McPhee's—and thus screenwriter Thompson's—intent all along.

However, Thompson also alters the template in substantial ways, some of them justified by the demands of drama and others less so. First, rather than fill the family with dozens of essentially anonymous children, she has understandably trimmed the number of children down to seven and given them all somewhat distinct personalities; in particular, she has beefed up the role of eldest son Simon (Love Actually's Thomas Sangster), who has personally overseen the children's efforts to drive away all the other nannies, and now cannot understand why his efforts to drive this new one away are failing. Second, and more regrettably, she has killed off the mother, and turned the father, Mr. Cedric Brown (Colin Firth), into an insecure single parent who is obliged to find a new wife within a few weeks, lest he lose the regular allowance he receives from his stern Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury).

next page... |  1 of 3 | last page