Mary Poppins

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Mary Poppins gives the Banks household an apparently orderly address and a thoroughly unsettled life. George Banks returns from the bank expecting punctual routines, while Jane and Michael have exhausted another nanny and Winifred has been occupied with campaigning for women’s votes. The adults have important concerns, but the children experience their absence as a lack of attention. When George tears up the advertisement in which they describe the nanny they want, its journey up the chimney turns that disagreement into an invitation. Mary’s arrival answers a wish the father has tried to dispose of, and her handling of the interview immediately unsettles his assumption that he controls every arrangement.

Julie Andrews plays Mary with a composure that makes impossible things seem like matters of good organisation. A carpetbag contains far more than its size should allow, and tidying a nursery becomes an activity that objects can perform themselves. Her firmness keeps the magic from making her a companion who simply indulges every whim. She sets expectations and refuses explanations when the children press her, preserving a distance that helps give her authority. The pleasure comes from seeing practical tasks acquire possibilities that the household’s rules have concealed. Work still exists in her world, but it can involve imagination and shared enjoyment instead of serving as evidence that enjoyment must wait.

Bert belongs to that more flexible world from the beginning. His changing occupations let him appear around London as a performer, an artist or a chimney sweep, and Dick Van Dyke gives his encounters with Mary an easy familiarity. Their outing into a chalk drawing changes the film’s visual rules without changing that relationship. Live performers share the frame with animated animals and landscapes, allowing a pavement picture to become somewhere the children can explore. Mary and Bert move through the setting as though its wonders are perfectly ordinary. Carousel horses can leave their fixed route, and a race can become an extension of an afternoon’s play rather than a departure requiring a complicated explanation.

The musical numbers give these transformations room to develop. Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs move between domestic tasks, exuberant spectacle and quiet reflection, so the film’s rhythm can follow more than the next event in a plot. The visit to Uncle Albert takes laughter literally, lifting the company toward a tea table near the ceiling. Coming down requires a change in feeling, making emotion part of how a scene’s physical world behaves. These episodes have their own comic shape, but they also establish a way of seeing familiar surroundings differently. A room, a drawing and a rooftop can all become available for something beyond the use an adult has assigned to them.

That attention becomes gentler when Mary describes the woman selling bird food outside St Paul’s. The small sum Michael wants to spend has a meaning beyond its financial value, and the image of an elderly woman asking people to notice the birds slows the film after its more expansive adventures. At the bank, the same coins enter George’s world of investment, authority and future returns. Michael’s resistance produces a disruption the institution cannot contain, and frightened customers turn an argument over a child’s money into a rush to withdraw their own. The contrast lets a very modest decision expose the distance between the children’s immediate concerns and the adults’ certainty about what should matter.

Bert helps the children understand their father when they flee the bank. He recognises how George’s position can imprison him in responsibilities, offering them a perspective they have not received from the man himself. The journey over London’s rooftops then turns the city’s functional structures into an enormous stage. Chimney sweeps dance across surfaces that ordinarily belong to work, smoke and isolation, with Mary keeping pace in her own precise fashion. Their exuberance eventually spills into the Banks home and further disturbs its routine. Under the comedy, Bert’s sympathy gives George a place in the film’s emotional world before George knows how to claim one for himself.

Being summoned to the bank leaves George facing humiliation and the possible loss of the identity around which he has organised his days. Michael’s offer of the coins adds another feeling to that walk: the child understands that something has gone wrong and wants to help. George’s encounter with his employers brings together the nonsense, laughter and concern for small things he has been resisting. Returning to the children with a repaired kite gives his change a practical form. He spends time on something that matters to them without needing to justify it as preparation for adult success. Winifred joins him, and the family’s movement into the park opens the house’s tightly managed life toward a shared activity.

Mary can leave because she is no longer the only person making that shared life possible. The departure has sadness within its elegance, particularly when the children’s delight takes their attention elsewhere. Her work has made her less necessary, and she accepts that result without asking the family to organise itself around her. Robert Stevenson’s film allows large dance sequences, animated fantasies and quiet gestures to inhabit the same carefully imagined London. The ending brings them down to the scale of parents and children holding a kite together. The magic has not removed employment, disagreement or responsibility; it has helped a household find ways to include affection among those demands.