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Film review

Hardly toothsome

It's difficult to get past the dreary beginning - or Emma Thompson's grotesque prosthetics - to find the hidden charms of Nanny McPhee.

By JANET K. KEELER
Published January 26, 2006

Actors playing ugly has worked wonders for a handful of Hollywood beauties in recent years.

For example, Nicole Kidman in The Hours (big nose), Halle Berry in Monster's Ball (no makeup and bad hair) and Charlize Theron in Monster (fleshy, ruddy skin, permanent frown and, again, bad hair). They won Oscars for their efforts.

Emma Thompson out-uglies them all in Nanny McPhee with unibrow, hairy moles, bulbous nose and a single, Chiclet tooth dangling over her bottom lip. Just guessing here, but an Academy Award is not in her future for her grotesque nanny.

Worse yet, the accomplished and engaging Thompson did this to herself as the screenwriter. She's said it took five years to whittle Christianna Brand's meandering Nurse Matilda children's stories into a screenplay. Maybe she should have started from scratch or perhaps director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine) could have intervened.

It's difficult to see beyond the beaver tooth, even once viewers know there is a chance the nanny won't always look so scary.

In this fractured fairy tale, Nanny McPhee, a "government nanny," comes out of nowhere to save the seven dirty, rotten Brown children from themselves. (Imagine Nanny 911 meets Mary Poppins.) Their hapless, widowed father (played by an unusually uninspired Colin Firth) is at his wit's end after the devil children run off their 17th caregiver. The latest to jump ship thinks the children have eaten the baby.

What else could she think when one is gnawing on a roasted turkey leg dressed in a blue baby bootie?

Things change when Nanny McPhee and her magical cane enter the disheveled home. Children learn to say "please" and "thank you" and even begin to put others' well-being before their own.

But there's still a catch. You see, Mr. Brown isn't making enough money as the local mortician to keep up the payments on the family home. To see him through, Great Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury with an equally distracting fake nose) has agreed to pay the bills until he gets married. She gives him a deadline of one month.

Of course the perfect wife is under Mr. Brown's normal-size nose all the time, but the daft dad proposes to the oft-married Mrs. Quickly (Celia Imrie) before he finally gets it right.

Nanny McPhee motors sedately until blowsy and boozy Mrs. Quickly comes along, finally giving the audience a villain. No doubt, she will be an evil stepmother.

Mrs. Quickly, dressed in riotous flowered gowns, is just one of a cast full of quirky characters, and that's the problem with Nanny McPhee. Everyone is so odd, draped in bougainvillea fuchsia and electric lime green, that the point of the movie, whatever it is, becomes muddled, then ultimately irrelevant.

It ends better than it starts with a delicious wedding and wild food fight. The final 20 minutes help erase the curiously dreary beginning.

The Browns, we know, will live happily ever after and Nanny McPhee will begin again with children who "need but do not want her" and leave them when they "want but do not need her."

- Janet K. Keeler can be reached at 727 893-8586 or krieta@sptimes.com Her blog, Stir Crazy, is www.sptimes.com/blogs/food

Grade: C+

Director: Kirk Jones

Cast: Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury, Imelda Staunton, Kelly Macdonald, Celia Imrie, Thomas Sangster

Screenplay: Emma Thompson, based on Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda stories

Rating: PG, mildly rude humor

Running time: 92 min.

[Last modified January 25, 2006, 10:09:06]