As a long-time admirer of film, as soon as I have seen one my opinion rarely changes. But that does not appear to be the case with 2010’s Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang – a sequel that I don’t think the world was exactly screaming for, yet it happened.
I saw it in the cinema when it first came out and remember not liking it and for many years my opinion never changed. But then, over a decade later, I decided I would watch it again and while I was no doubt prepared for the same outcome as before, what I got instead was a film that was surprisingly better than I remembered.
The film takes place in 1943 on a farm which is being run almost single-handedly by wife and mother Isobel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal), because her husband is away fighting in the war. Not only is she running the farm but also working in a shop with an eccentric woman named Mrs Doherty (Maggie Smith) and looking after her children (the eldest of whom, Norman, is played by Asa Butterfield). They are well-behaved, if a little boisterous. She also has to dodge her brother-in-law Phill (Rhys Ifans), who wants her to sell the farm as he gambled it away; and on top of that, the children’s wealthy but snobbish cousins Cyril and Celia (Eros Vlahos and Rosie Taylor-Ritson) arrive and quickly clash with the other children. It’s not long before Nanny McPhee arrives and anyone who saw the first film will already have some idea of what’s going to happen.
Getting the obvious out of the way, Emma Thompson slips right back into the role of the titular Nanny, which could be viewed as either good or bad. In the beginning she does have to come across as unwanted and a problem in the eyes of the children, while trying to get them to change the way they act round each other. This she does fairly well, but again Thompson doesn’t do a lot with the part that hadn’t been done before. Gyllenhaal is obviously playing a part that probably doesn’t ask a lot of her but to her credit, while she’s obviously not English I think she just about manages the accent. Ifans seems to jump in and out of the narrative and does so in such a way that the audience could forget he’s even part of it. After a point he maybe gets a little annoying. I don’t know why Maggie Smith is even in this film as it’s a small part that could have been played by anyone; the only real purpose for her character is to provide a connection to the first film that I don’t want to spoil, but it’s nothing mind-bending or remarkable.
Moving onto the child actors, Butterfield stands out right away due to the body of work he was in both before and after this. He does what’s asked of him but is not being used to his full potential here. The actors playing his siblings can easily be forgotten as they don’t leave much of a lasting impression, while the only reason Vlahos and Taylor-Ritson stand out is because of how cartoonishly snobbish they have to act when first introduced.
Actors having to work with indifferent material seems to be something of a recurring problem here. it’s doesn’t just happen with Smith but also with a general played by Ralph Fiennes, and at the end Ewan Macgregor shows up as the Greens’ dad for less than a minute. There’s also Daniel Mays as a chauffeur, but I don’t view him as an actor with the same kind of reputation as some of the others in the cast.
Kirk Jones directed the first Nanny McPhee but this time Susanne White is behind the camera. Her direction is competent enough, in particular in a sequence involving flying piglets – it looks fine, but it is supposed to be one of the film’s highlights. I think I can just about call it passable.
This point may be a little bit on the obscure side, but Nanny McPhee is actually based on a book series called Nurse Matilda by a writer called Christianna Brand, and just like the first film Thompson herself wrote the script. I don’t know if this is down to her writing or White’s direction but I really am surprised by how much my view of the film has changed. It’s never boring, something always seems to be happening that keeps you paying just the right amount of attention and this is something I can admire. There is a line about dropping bombs which can be viewed as foreshadowing, but it’s not very subtle and feels like it’s being emphasised for a reason. I know I shouldn’t be expecting subtlety here so I suppose it’s a minor annoyance. I know Thompson is an actress first and occasional screenwriter second, and keeping that in mind, her efforts, while far from terrible, could have also used some improvement.
Where the first film never really left the main house or the area surrounding it, this one has a flying motorbike scene as part of a visit to London. This made me think that the film was going for the ‘bigger is better’ mentality as it’s a sequel. While it may have been a brief but nice touch, it really wasn’t necessary as it was only there so that the characters could go from one place to another quickly for a single piece of information. Had this film been a first entry I’m sure they would have found another way for such details to be conveyed to the characters that didn’t involve flying motorbikes.
Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang isn’t as bad as my ten-year-old self thought. It’s not perfect, but not terrible either. There were plans for a third film but in the eyes of the studio, this one didn’t do well enough and the plans were promptly cancelled. I have to admit that doesn’t really bother me. It was a good way to spend under two hours and I got to see how wrong I had been about this film the first time round. Now I don’t want it or need it, so it has to go.
