Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I was able to check out that new Paddington flick recently and wanted to put down a few words about it.
Paddington Bear wasn't much of an influence on my childhood. I knew the image of the bear with the red hat and blue coat and I probably had a book or two gifted by a distant relations that I thumbed through once or twice, but at that age if I was reading about cartoon bears it was gonna be of the Berenstain variety.
I mention all this backstory only to say that I went into this film with little to no baggage or expectation. I saw that creepy Paddington meme when the advertising started and had a laugh, but it wasn't until it opened in the UK that I even started paying attention to word on the film, which was highly positive.
Add my voice to the many heaping praise on this film. I guess I should have known not to write this off when I heard that Harry Potter's David Heyman produced it. That guy seems to have a good eye for family content and finding filmmakers that can strike a balance between real emotion and silly cartoony comedy.
Paddington is a fairy tale about an English speaking bear whose home in deepest darkest Peru is destroyed and he's sent to London to try to find a new home. He comes to discover London is a cold, unfriendly place, but a nice family offers to help him find a place of his own while a creepy lady taxidermist is hot on his trail.
The secret to this movie's success is all in its tone. It reminded me a lot of Gore Verbinski's Mousehunt if that gives you a good frame of reference. Paddington is cute, but not cloying. It's funny, but not stupid. It's emotionally engaging, but not preachy. It'll entertain kids and parents alike, I believe. I'm not a parent, so I can't say that 100%, but I did have a blast with this movie and last I checked I wasn't a child... although I guess a house filled with collectibles, toys and movie posters might suggest otherwise.
One of the more interesting aspects of the film is how overly CG the opening is since it's mostly Paddington and his bear family. It's borderland Pixar there's so many pixels on the screen, but when Paddington makes his way to London suddenly the computer effect disappeared and I just focused on the character. I have no idea if this was intentional or just a happy side effect of the decision to have Paddington be the only CG thing in our real, recognizable world, but it worked wonders for me.
The family dynamic is so strong that I found I didn't need another entry point into this world. The veneer of believability was easy to pass through, which is crucial in a fairy tale like this. I bought the conceit of a talking bear immediately and was able to invest emotionally with the story thanks to how well drawn out the core family is.
A lot of that is due to Ben Whishaw's perfectly innocent line delivery as Paddington, but I'd say most of it is in the casting of the human family, particularly the parents, played by Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins. Actually, Bonneville brings a lot to the movie, keeping the grumpy dad character from being the dull caricature we're used to in kids films.
David Tomlinson's Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins is perhaps the best example of this character type... the grumpy dad who you know will eventually come around by the end of the movie. A lot of family films try to go for that trope, but the conversion at the end doesn't feel earned. That is absolutely not the case here. You figure out what's going to happen pretty early on and I think the filmmakers were smart enough to know the audience would be a step ahead of them, so instead they focus more on investing the audience into Paddington's emotional journey.
Sally Hawkins is great as the mom (the bleeding heart of the family whose determination to do the right thing is what sets off Bonneville's road to redemption as it were) and I liked the two kids a lot (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin), but the real MVP of the film is Nicole Kidman.
You can't have good guys earning a triumph without a despicable baddie trying to block their way. In this case it's Kidman doing her best Cruella de Vil. She's the amoral taxidermist rocking a blonde Maud Lebowski haircut who is desperate to add Paddington to the British Museum of Natural History's specimen display.
Kidman goes all out here. She's not the cold and caculatingly cruel villain she normally plays when tasked for villains (The Golden Compass jumps to mind). No, she's flamboyant and comes real close to being comically over the top, but stops just short, which means we get a baddie that's actually pretty threatening while also being really fun to watch.
I guess that's what I responded to with this movie. The emotion was there, the feeling of danger was there, the humor was there, but underneath it all was a sense of fun. I just enjoyed watching it, no matter which emotional string director Paul King was trying to pluck.
If all kids films were like Paddington you wouldn't hear grown ups bitch about them so often, I think.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. The flick hits screens tomorrow here in the US. Take the kids! Preferably your kids. Don't just take random kids. I think that's not wholly legal...
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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