Emma Thompson

While “Nanny McPhee Returns” is suitably supercalifragilistic, it’s not quite as expialidocious as the original.

This twinkly and slightly twee follow-up to 2005’s “Nanny McPhee” leans far more heavily on high-tech, CGI magic than on the old-fashioned storybook kind that made the first film such a quaint, literate charmer. Under the direction of Susanna White, a veteran British TV director making her big-screen debut, the sequel is more sweetly sentimental and cartoonishly antic than the first.

Again, the film posits itself as an antidote to the syrupy goodness of Mary Poppins. Like Miss Poppins – but with a gnarly turnip nose, a wormlike unibrow, two whiskery facial moles and a rabbity snaggle tooth – Nanny McPhee is a British governess with a touch of magic in her pragmatic child-rearing ways.

But whereas Julie Andrews’ sprightly performance as Miss Poppins was offered up with a heaping spoonful of sugar, Emma Thompson’s sly and slightly menacing portrayal of Nanny McPhee comes with a biting spoonful of bitters.
Thompson, who again penned the screenplay inspired by mystery writer Christianna Brand’s trio of “Nurse Matilda” books, is no slouch when it comes to adapting literary material for the screen. She won an Oscar for her sterling 1995 script of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

This time around, she moves the action to 1940s rural England, where the overwhelmed Mrs. Green (lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal with a finely honed British accent) struggles to keep the family farm afloat while her husband is away at war. Compounding her troubles are three boisterous children whose rustic country life is upended by the arrival of two snooty, spoiled city cousins evacuated from war-torn London.

Naturally, country cousins and city cousins clash amid the barnyard muck (“Greetings, oh covered-in-poo people,” sneers the Woosterish cousin Cyril upon first seeing his grimy country kin). Soon, the children are engaged in all-out war – slinging poo, soiling clothing, breaking china and generally running amuck.

Enter Nanny McPhee, unbidden and unannounced, to throw off sparks from her gnarled walking stick and impose a stern but kindly sense of order among the children.

Naturally, the youngsters resist at first, led by the big-brother earnestness of Norman (Asa Butterfield) and the snotty archness of Cyril (Eros Vlahos).

But Nanny chides them, “When you need me, but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but do not need me, then I will have to go.”

Naturally, the rude youngsters are no match for Nanny McPhee, who patiently but firmly instills in them five valuable life lessons: to stop fighting, share nicely, help each other, be brave and have faith.

The film benefits greatly from impressive cameos by stellar friends-of-Emma in Britain’s theater world: Ewan MacGregor and Ralph Fiennes as the off-at-war dads; Bill Bailey as the farmer with a high regard for the intelligence of pigs, and a dottery Maggie Smith, the game grand dame who is not above lowering herself daintily onto a cow patty.

Rhys Ifans makes a fine if nattering villain of the piece as Mrs. Green’s conniving brother-in-law intent on conning her into selling the farm to pay off his overdue gambling debt.

Through it all, Thompson presides calmly over this imaginative little children’s movie with sharp intelligence and unfussy good sense. If only “Nanny McPhee Returns” had reined in its erratic energy and gone lighter on the CGI effects it might have surpassed the odd, eccentric charms of the original.

- Dennis King

“Nanny McPhee Returns”

PG
1:40
2.5 stars
Starring: Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith
(Rude humor, some language and mild thematic elements)

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