Sometimes the people who make “family films” forget that they’re supposed to be making something that the whole family can enjoy, and they fall into the trap of thinking that making little kids laugh is their only job. There’s also the mistaken notion that making little kids laugh is a simple matter of being loud and silly, and as long as you slip a few “adult” jokes into the abrasiveness in order to appease the parents who have been dragged to the theater, you’ve done your job. That’s lazy. Making movies that appeal to people of all ages in a legitimate way is possible, it’s just hard to do. It takes engaging storytelling, the creation of memorable characters, and humor that’s clever without being alienating and broad without being obnoxious. That’s what we’re dealing with here. When, in the first five minutes of Paddington, you’ve already been made to care about a couple of talking bears and you’ve already had a good belly laugh, you know that you’re in capable hands.
Paddington tells the story of the title character (who’s voiced by Ben Whishaw), an orphaned young bear from “Darkest Peru” who travels to London thanks to a promise a British explorer made his aunt and uncle long ago that, if they should ever find themselves in London, they would receive a warm welcome. You see, despite the fact that they are very much bears, Paddington and his family are a special kind of talking bears, who seem to be just as cultured and intelligent as humans. Why this is so is never really explained, which is one of the best things about the movie. Instead of coming up with a reason for why bears can talk, Paddington just assumes that the world is an interesting and magical enough place that it’s possible. Setting that kind of tone works great for drawing kids in and getting them excited about the possibilities a movie is putting before them, and it sets the stage perfectly for Paddington’s rocky road toward assimilating himself within the new human family he meets in London. You see, even when bears are smart, they still tend to break a lot of stuff.
To be a little more specific about the humor and how it’s able to play to both young members of the family and the old, take Paddington’s fish out of water routine. His travels to London bring him into contact with a whole laundry list of colorful characters, who kids appreciate as being eccentric and silly, but who the adults in the audience will be able to appreciate on another level because their behavior often takes satirical jabs at British culture. This movie pokes fun at Brits and their overly mannered, perennially awkward social interactions in a very loving and very delightful way, which demonstrates the soft touch that it takes to make jokes that appeal to everyone. There’s some welcome Meta humor in here too, in between all of the scenes where Paddington is trashing his new house. The best bit of which is a quip that makes fun of how establishing shots of cities always go for scenery porn rather than maintaining any sort of realistic portrayal of which parts of the city its characters would realistically be traveling through.
The acting is overall very strong, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise, because Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins play the new parents who bring Paddington into their home, and they’re always great in everything, but what’s a bit of a surprise is how much fun Nicole Kidman is. She’s an actress whose screen presence is often too cold and distant for me to accept her in the lead roles that she’s usually given, but it works really well in a villain role like this, where she’s playing basically Cruella de Vil minus the senses of humor or fashion.
The things that don’t quite work here are the scenes where Paddington gets into bumbling situations where he has to interact with his surrounding environments and a bunch of stuff gets broken in supposedly comical fashion. Physical humor is pretty much a necessity in a movie like this, but the effects budget for believably bringing all of the hijinks to life would have required the budget of a giant summertime blockbuster, and Paddington just doesn’t have what it takes to make complex scenes of a computer generated bear destroying a house look realistic. It only takes a slight break in the connection between a comedy and its viewer in order to keep a joke from landing, and the artificiality of the effects work is enough to cause that break. What works much better though are the scenes in which a dollhouse in Paddington’s attic morphs into the actual house they’re living in, and you can see what each member of the family is doing in all the different rooms at once. It’s very Wes Anderson, in a good way, and it’s a great tool for establishing the setting and the characters.
All of this is to say that Paddington is put together well enough to be one of the few family films that really can be watched and enjoyed by the whole family, and not just the youngest and least discerning members of the clan. More than that though, it’s a movie about being polite, and open-hearted, and about celebrating what each of us have that makes us unique. That’s just really great—especially the hard-line stance the movie takes on always being polite. Kids need to hear this stuff, these days more than ever, because, from what I can tell, the parents who are raising them are generally uncouth goons.
