Review of Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010) by Shiira — 28 Aug 2010

Cut the Green children some slack; their father is away at war. It's hard being left behind, the not knowing, moment to moment, if you still have two parents. Life during wartime, life on a pig farmer's wages, that's more than enough stress for Norman(Asa Butterfield) and Megsie(Lil Woods), the muddy children of a soldier who worry if their evergreen mother(the beautiful Maggie Gylenhaal) can keep the farm from going under.

While machinations loom, the agenda of a degenerate uncle(Rhys Ifans) with gambling debts to pay off, the Green family takes in borders, the Gray children, Cyril(Eros Vlahos) and Celia(Rosie Taylor Rilson), rich cousins from the city who don't like their new digs, and don't like them.

"Nanny McPhee Returns" deals a lot with the dynamics between the bourgeois and the proletariat, and how even a woman of modest means end up on the wrong side of the class war(i.e. Ms. Kilman, the homely tutor who fawns over Elizabeth in Virginia Woolf's "Miss Dalloway").

Matilda, Nanny McPhee's real name(the two films are adapted from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books), was also the name of a boxing kangaroo(Daniel Mann's "Matilda", starring Elliott Gould), which is so befitting since the nanny runs a kangaroo court.

When a brouhaha erupts in the children's quarters, not only are Cyril and Celia punished, but Norman and Megsie, as well, even though their misbehavior is only natural, a result of their houseguests' ingratitude who put on airs from the very moment they arrive.

Nanny McPhee(Emma Thompson) is magic; she casts a spell on her charges by striking her walking stick on the ground as a means of discipline, when what she really ought to do is reprimand the pint-sized urbanites for being such ungrateful little snots.

But no, the nanny arbitrates arbitrarily, punishing both the poor and rich alike, without ever considering the factors of the situation. Under the thrall of McPhee's invocation, Norman turns into a vandal, and watches helplessly as the nanny nearly turns his father's warfront dispatches into ash.

As it turns out, the rich have their own issues to deal with, and in the Gray children's case, they have a stereotypically British military father(stiff upper lip and the whole nine yards) who seems, literally, cold-blooded, when the moviegoer sees him handle Cyril's request.

(Ralph Fiennes would be right at home in Alan Parker's "Pink Floyd: The Wall".) Now the moviegoer sympathizes with the boy and girl, just like the nanny, who helps Mrs. Green because she's not one of the common people, after all.

With each good deed, the nanny grows more and more beautiful, until she looks, well, just like Emma Thompson, a lady.