It’s a risky business, going to see a movie adapted from a beloved children’s book. Young readers are able to conjure an entire fictional world so vividly inside their heads that a film director’s efforts at translation can seem redundant, or even worse. Sometimes, a director’s vision can overwhelm the original: watching Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are”—even if one admires the movie—requires an acquiescence to Jonze’s own idiosyncratic reading of Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, a substitution of Jonze’s imagination for one’s own. Sometimes an adaptation is transparently meretricious: the 2012 movie “The Lorax” had none of the delightfulness of the 1971 book, and instead partook of the thoughtless consumption and commercialism that Dr. Seuss sought to critique.
“Paddington,” which is based upon the beloved series of books by Michael Bond about a bear found by a family at a London train station, might so easily have been a disappointment. The trailer was not altogether promising. It showcased a gross-out scene—Paddington sticking toothbrushes in his ears and loading them with earwax; Paddington sticking his head down the toilet for a drink—and featured Paddington riding a claw-foot bathtub down a spiral staircase, on a wave of excess bath water. Humor based on scatology or bodily secretions, and the use of roller-coaster special effects, seems obligatory in children’s movies, at least those made in the United States or Britain. (Hayao Miyazaki manages without them.) But they don’t figure prominently in the original books, where the extent of Bond’s bathroom humor was to have Paddington’s bathtub overflow.
In fact, “Paddington,” directed by Paul King, offers a wonderfully winning interpretation of Bond’s original. As the critics have pointed out, it successfully interpolates a plot that’s absent in any of the Paddington books, with Nicole Kidman gleefully enacting the role of a museum director with a taxidermy fetish. And Ben Whishaw’s vocal performance as the bear himself—polite, curious, hopeful—is endearing, even if the presence of teeth in Paddington’s animated mouth takes some getting used to, especially for viewers raised not just on the books but also on the stop-motion television adaptation that aired on British TV in the late seventies and early eighties. (For those not raised thus, here is the first episode.)
But “Paddington” isn’t just about a bear; it’s about an entire cultural milieu. The movie has pitch-perfect tone for a very English register of resignation. Consider the police officer who, upon hearing Mrs. Brown’s description of the missing Paddington—three feet six, with a battered hat and duffel coat, and he’s a bear—replies dolefully, “That’s not much to go on.” Then there is the pair of security guards quizzing each other on the nutritional value of a packet of biscuits—measuring out their lives with carbohydrate counts. It is a perfect vignette of a failure so profound it passes for pleasure.
In the way that it captures this cramped Englishness, “Paddington” is reminiscent, at times, of Mike Leigh, at least when Leigh is at his most forgiving. (Leigh, who typically snarls at the affluent, would likely be far less patient than King is with the Browns, who appear to have risen with the tide of gentrification, and inhabit a handsome house in one of London’s most desirable corners.) This impression is reinforced by King’s use of actors beloved by Leigh: Mrs. Brown, now mildly bohemian, is played by Sally Hawkins, who starred in Leigh’s “Happy Go Lucky”; Mr. Gruber, the Hungarian immigrant who owns an antique shop on Portobello Road, is played by Jim Broadbent, another Leigh favorite; Paddington’s Aunt Lucy has the voice of Imelda Staunton, who was remarkable in Leigh’s “Vera Drake.” King’s casting choices are often inspired, and, like the Harry Potter films, with which “Paddington” shares a producer, David Heyman, the movie is studded with appearances by celebrated British character actors and comic performers. These include Julie Walters—whose Mrs. Bird, in an acknowledgment of changing social mores, is now a relative of the Browns, rather than their housekeeper—and Geoffrey Palmer, a familiar face to anyone who grew up watching English television sitcoms of the seventies and eighties. Among other roles, Palmer was the phlegmatic guest at Fawlty Towers who insisted upon sausages for breakfast, even as the staff struggled to dispose of an inconvenient corpse.
Ostensibly, “Paddington” is about the unexpected openness of contemporary British society: the fact that even a bear from Darkest Peru can find a way to be at home in Notting Hill. But underneath that message, there is also a fond, amused depiction of enduring aspects of national character. The movie offers a gently satirical portrait of a particular English upper-middle-class sensibility: liberal, but sometimes effortfully so; emotionally restrained, but not lacking in feeling, for all that restraint. Hugh Bonneville’s Mr. Brown, who mutters “stranger danger” at his first sight of Paddington—while hustling his family along the train platform after a wholesomely educational visit to a Victorian wool museum—is a poignant representative of the middle-aged English man who so embraces limitation that he has persuaded himself that limitation is his preference. Hawkins’s Mrs. Brown, with her earnest, rebuffed attempts to sustain the connection of childhood with Judy, her sullen teen-age daughter—she brightly, desperately “darling”s Judy, almost to distraction—is the quivering embodiment of well-meaning, middle-class metropolitan motherhood.
In this sense, “Paddington” is imbued with an awareness about its cultural role that its literary precursor never had. (Bond did not know that he was creating a global phenomenon when he wrote the first of his books.) Mr. Brown, a viewer senses, is the kind of person who is pained by the omnipresence of gross-out humor in children’s movies, but if “Paddington” has gentle fun with the onset of his cultural conservatism, it doesn’t really judge him for it. Meanwhile, in its fleshing out of the character of Mrs. Brown from Bond’s original, “Paddington” makes a suggestive choice. Mrs. Brown might have had any career; given the comforts of the Bonds’ home, a remunerative one might have been most realistic. Instead, she belongs to the marginal fellowship of authors: she is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. That the movie makes a nod to the vivid and enduring appeal to the young imagination of the literary, in spite of the stimulations and seductions of the screen, is part of its charm and its truth.
