REVIEWED - NANNY MCPHEE: This Victorian children's adventure, adapted by Emma Thompson from a series of novels by Christianna Brand, clearly aches to be described as "magical". There is certainly a lot of magic in it. Donkeys talk. Snow falls in August. Angela Lansbury calls round for tea and nobody gets murdered. In fact, there is a little too much enchantment about the place.
Though Nanny McPhee, like Marius Goring's heavenly emissary in A Matter of Life and Death, cannot interfere with affairs of the heart, she can tidy away most every other problem simply by rapping her bewitched staff on the ground (remembering a particular Marvel comic, I kept expecting her to turn into Thor). As a result, the dilemmas her young charges face do not engender much tension. When you have a demigod on your side, you can be fairly sure nothing too dreadful is going to befall you.
That said, no film with so many agreeable supporting performances could fail to entertain. Imelda Staunton, everything about her as ruddy as a recently slapped pig, makes a hilariously hearty cook. The inestimable Ms Lansbury, warming over a Lady Bracknell she must surely have been called upon to deliver at some stage in her career, is pungent as the beastly Aunt whose money keeps a roof above twitchy widower Colin Firth's head. And tiny Kelly Macdonald, playing the scullery maid, deftly mixes sweetness with pragmatism.
The most puzzling aspect of the enterprise is Thompson's Nanny McPhee herself. Summoned out of the firmament when Firth's children scare off the last child-carer in town, she arrives - initially all shadow, like a benign Nosferatu - to spread a very gloomy kind of order about the place. Decked out in fright makeup that looks very like fright makeup, Thompson, whose CV may have scared the director into uncomplaining acquiescence, delivers her lines in the careful, bland monotone you expect to emerge from a speak-your-weight machine.
After a while you just forget she's there. Since everybody else is such good fun, this doesn't detract much from the film's modest charms.
Directed by Kirk Jones. Starring Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Angela Lansbury, Imelda Staunton G cert, gen release, 97 min
