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Isabel Green is doing the best she can. Her husband is off fighting in the British Army, and it's up to her to corral their three unruly children, manage the struggling family farm, and earn grocery money by working a day job at the town's general store. Once two more youngsters are added to the mix--the Greens' snooty niece and nephew from London--it's clear Isabel has more on her hands than she can handle. When she reaches her wit's end after a particular trying day, every cupboard and tea-pot in the general store comes to life with a clear and emphatic message: "The person you need is Nanny McPhee."
Viewers familiar with the original Nanny McPhee (2006) can guess what happens next. A warty, uni-browed, snaggle-toothed governess--equal parts Mary Poppins, Supernanny, and Ugly Betty--arrives at Isabel's doorstep and informs the harried young mother that the army has sent her to teach the children five important lessons. Isabel's alarm and suspicion quickly turn to gratitude when, within an hour, the nanny has used her magical powers to impart Lesson One: To Stop Fighting. While the children try to determine whether their new caregiver is using wartime secrets to overpower them, a relieved Isabel agrees to let the mysterious nanny continue with her lessons. As the ragtag family deals with the threat of war, a missing father, and the looming loss of the farm, Nanny McPhee progresses quickly from the children's nemesis to their ally in a series of quirky adventures.
As in the original, Nanny McPhee Returns is the brainchild of Emma Thompson, who stars in the title role and wrote the screenplay. (Read our 2006 interview.) Wisely, Thompson stays faithful to the formula that fueled the original Nanny McPhee (and the Nurse Matilda books which inspired it). The nanny must use her magic to teach the children a series of lessons. With every lesson learned, one disfiguring aspect of the nanny's countenance is healed, until the children see the beauty in not only the person but also in the authority and right living she represents. Eventually, the children--now not only better behaved but braver too--are equipped to save the day for the somewhat hapless adults around them.
Where sequels normally suffer in the shadows of the films that spawned them, Nanny McPhee Returns actually runs with its predecessor's formula and becomes something better. Anyone who has read a child a bedtime story knows that kids love repetition and the satisfaction that comes from having some idea what will happen next. Viewers who have seen the first Nanny McPhee now have the gratification of being in on the jokes and secrets of the second--they know what's going on long before the characters in the story, and there's something enjoyable about that. Furthermore, this familiarity allows the filmmakers to play with the audience's expectations and create a surprise or two along the way--as in a scene where viewers are led to wrongly assume that a familiar silhouette in the doorway signifies the arrival of the nanny.
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Emma Thompson as the title character
THE NEW YORK TIMES reviewed by Mike Hale
Emma Thompson is back, warts, snaggletooth and all, to teach unruly children lessons in self-reliance and to remind parents that they're basically useless if sometimes amusing appendages in "Nanny McPhee Returns."
The film was released in Britain in March under the title "Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang," which was a reference not to the origins of the universe but to a late plot twist involving some unexploded ordnance and the pyrotechnic harvesting of a field of barley. Ms. Thompson, writer of both "Nanny McPhee" (2005) and this sequel, has jumped ahead from the vaguely Victorian setting of the original (which matched the Christianna Brand children's books on which the McPhee character is based) to a bucolic World War II home front in which the Blitz looks like a particularly strenuous summer on the farm.
Under the direction of Susanna White, a television veteran ("Generation Kill," "Bleak House") making her feature debut, "Nanny McPhee Returns" forsakes the menacing air and psychedelic color scheme of the original for a broader comic tone and a sunny, gold-flecked palette. Neither the dangers of the plot -- a dissolute uncle who wants to sell the farm, a father missing in action -- nor the forbidding Nanny McPhee herself are as fearsome as they were the first time around.
In place of menace, "Return" offers dung: the film's most consistent motif is the danger of stepping in, sitting on or being splattered by it. This may please the younger members of the audience, though at a preview screening they were noticeably quiet, perhaps bewildered by the British accents and the frequent references to the War Office. (One incisive 5- or 6-year-old critic did pipe up during the closing credits, asking, "Why wasn't it in 3-D?")
The hapless parent in need of the nanny's help, a widower played by Colin Firth in the original, is now a war wife struggling to keep the farm going and is played by the American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. Ms. Gyllenhaal works very hard to meet the script's alternating demands for melancholy and manic cheerfulness while keeping a credible British accent in place. She does better than you might expect, mainly by doing a close imitation of the young Emma Thompson.
Ms. Thompson herself, who made a vivid, even unsettling impression in "Nanny McPhee," is relatively innocuous this time around, like a walk-on in her own film. With the formula established -- as she cajoles the children into learning her lessons, her blemishes disappear one by one, until Ms. Thompson looks like her radiantly attractive self -- there's apparently nothing new to know about the nanny.
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WATCH: 'Nanny McPhee Returns' Official Trailer
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES reviewed by Glenn Whipp
Emma Thompson is back as the wonder worker, this time teaching manners to some warring cousins.
When Emma Thompson donned a bulbous nose and a protruding snaggletooth to play the title character in 2005's charming family fantasy "Nanny McPhee," she was seen as playing a kind of anti-Mary Poppins, using a magical walking stick instead of a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
Watching Thompson settle again into the taciturn character in "Nanny McPhee Returns," it's clear the actress absolutely loves channeling her inner Shane, playing a calm, authoritative enforcer who arrives, unbidden, to clean up a mess and then rides off into the sunset when her work is done.
The new "McPhee," directed by Susanna White, tells a slightly different story but uses the same blend of broad comedy, respectful moralizing and special effects that made the first film a success. Thompson again wrote the screenplay, putting an emphasis on language, emotion and manners, qualities typically in short supply in movies geared toward families.
Where the first film pitted children against adults, the follow-up finds Nanny McPhee mediating a conflict between two sets of children. Thompson has moved the action forward a century to 1940s England, where frazzled Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) copes with tending to her three rambunctious kids and running a muddy farm while her husband (Ewan McGregor in a brief cameo) is off fighting in the war.
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Maggie Gyllenhaal as Isabel Green
CROSSWALK reviewed by Laura MacCorkle
"You are very clever. You can work it out." So says Nanny McPhee to seven unruly brothers and sisters in 2005's Nanny McPhee, the first film in a family-friendly franchise which now continues with the hilarious and heartwarming Nanny McPhee Returns.
As the mysterious and magical nanny who appeared on the doorstep of a widower and his naughty children the first time around, Nanny McPhee and her walking stick are back to address a new set of problems--but this time in a non-specific, "sort-of 1940s" war era.
"She's such a fascinating character," shares Emma Thompson who brings Nanny McPhee to life once again on-screen and also wrote the original screenplay as well as executive produced. "I wouldn't have done another one, I don't think, if I wasn't really interested in exploring and playing her again. Of course, because I write [the films], I have such a fascination with how the whole thing comes together. It's an incredibly satisfying endeavor."
Based on a character from the 1960s' "Nurse Matilda" children's book series by Christianna Brand, Nanny McPhee featured the collection's best stories which Thompson mined and adapted to create the script. In Nanny McPhee Returns, however, there wasn't much material left to use and so the two-time Academy Award winner had to start from scratch, taking much care to preserve the spirit of the original material over a three-year writing period.
Same Nanny, Different Family
In Nanny McPhee Returns, the story begins with Mrs. Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a young mother of three school-age children (Norman, Megsie and Vincent) who are headstrong and quarrelsome. She's desperately trying to hold down the family farm in the English countryside and work a day job while her husband Rory (Ewan McGregor) is away at war and hasn't been heard from in months. Adding another layer to thicken the plot, Mrs. Green's shifty brother-in-law Phil (Rhys Ifans) is trying to pressure her into selling him her husband's half of the family farm. And on top of that, she receives a telegram with the terrible news that Mr. Green has been killed in the war--something that everyone grieves and initially believes except for Norman, who "feels it in his bones" that his dad is still alive. The Green family could definitely use a little help--and a little Nanny McPhee and whatever lessons she has to present to a new group of children.
Whereas the main conflict in Nanny McPhee was between a father and his children, in Nanny McPhee Returns the warring involves the Green children and their posh London cousins (Celia and Cyril Gray) who have come to live with them for an unlimited stay. Upon introduction, Nanny McPhee repeats her well-known phrase: "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 then assesses the Green vs. Gray battle and helps bring some order to the household with five lessons: to stop fighting, to share nicely, to help each other, to be brave and to have faith.
"What I'm trying to do," explains Thompson when crafting screenplays, "is make stories that are enjoyable and funny while not ignoring or turning away from the fact that life is complicated.
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Eros Vlahos and Celia Gray as the bratty nephew and niece.
Isabelle Green vows she's not on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. She says she and her three children--Norman, Megsie and Vincent--are coping beautifully. Never mind the fact that her kids sass her, scuffle and screech while her husband fights in World War II. Izzy, who occasionally screeches herself, proclaims that they're just fine, thank you. And when her wealthy niece and nephew from London, Celia and Cyril, join the family on their farm for, seemingly, the express purpose of terrorizing their much less refined country cousins, Izzy still insists that she and her charges are just dandy.
Beyond the household squabbling, the Greens are in jeopardy of losing both their harvest and the family farm if they can't make a tractor payment. Izzy's sniveling brother-in-law, Phil, owns half of the estate and desperately needs to sell it to pay off his gambling debt. So when he isn't trying to sabotage the Greens, he's pressuring Izzy to sign away the deed.
It's all under control, Izzy would have you know.
Luckily, the mysterious--and hideously ugly--Nanny McPhee blows back onto the screen to have another go. And she sees everything as it really is: The children are out of control, Mrs. Green needs help, and Phil is a petty crook. She gets right to work.
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