The full text of this essay first appeared in print for The Servant, based out of Baltimore.
“Paddington is voiced by Ben Wishaw and sounds like a member of some indie-pop band coming down from an agonising ketamine high, and that’s just the start of what’s wrong in Paul King’s film.”
So begins Eddie Harrison’s strangely vindictive take-down for Film Authority of the beloved 2017 film Paddington 2. The partly-animated live-action sequel had only one month of enjoying the rarified air as the “best-reviewed movie of all time,” at least according to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, before Harrison decided enough was enough and skewered the lovable little bear for not fitting his childhood memory.
“This is not my Paddington Bear,” continued Harrison, “but a sinister, malevolent imposter who should be shot into space, or nuked from space at the first opportunity. Over-confident, snide and sullen, this manky-looking bear bears little relation to the classic character, and viewers should be warned; this ain’t yo mamma’s Paddington bear, and it won’t be yours either.”
…
Taking down Harrison’s bizarrely puerile and frankly terribly written review would be easy, but besides the point. The question of whether or not Paddington 2 really is the “greatest” film of all time is pointless—no art should be qualified by the amount of positive reviews it receives, but when anybody can submit a review to Letterboxd or post in the comments section of iMDB, how—and when—do we stop counting?
Months after Paddington 2 was released, Martin Scorsese wrote an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter in which he argued that aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic were more harmful than good, robotic behemoths that place artistic merit in an unfair binary of “rotten” or “fresh” and compound a studio’s anxieties and fixations on opening weekend grosses.
He was right, but more to the point, what even qualifies a good review versus a bad review? Eddie Harrison’s savage piece on Paddington 2 notwithstanding, most professional critics are a bit more nuanced. Still, when the online magazine Uproxx tweeted about Paddington 2’s ascendancy past Citizen Kane, the Museum of Moving Image quote-tweeted it with a photoshopped image of Paddington Brown’s face on Charles Foster Kane’s campaign poster so that it looked like the film’s eponymous auteur and star was gesturing towards the new future of greatness: a tiny Peruvian bear in a blue raincoat and Indiana Jones-style fedora.
When this bit of silliness shook the internet, I couldn’t stop muttering to people, half-ironically, that the Paddington films really are the greatest. Are they actually? Probably not, but again the question is superfluous and irrelevant. I don’t know if Paddington really deserves to be considered amongst Citizen Kane, or The Godfather, or Satantango, or Parasite (which currently sits atop Letterboxd’s user-generated best films list), but if Studio Ghibli’s animated masterpieces like Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service can be included in such rankings, why shouldn’t Paddington 2? I wasn’t arguing for its place in the pantheon, but that the tiny bear was a symbol of an idyllic utopia many of us pine for. Paddington is a rebuke of imperialist and colonialist attitudes of the West and a new template for social harmony.
In the first film, King immediately introduces us to Paddington’s adoptive parents. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo are living in “Darkest Peru” and have been discovered by an explorer who names them after his deceased mother and an eccentric “boxer I once met in a pub.” They raise the as-yet unnamed Paddington as their own and teach him that people can be changed simply by osmosis. In the second film this philosophy is expressed mostly through Paddington’s frequent quoting of his aunt: “Be kind and polite, and all will be right.” They learn their morality via a four-decades old London Tourist guide on a vinyl record that they play repeatedly, practicing some two hundred different idiomatic ways to say that it’s raining in English. They find fulfillment through the sharing of experiences and feelings and take everything at face value; in the original television series (created by the late Michael Bond), Paddington’s inability to understand sarcasm or idiosyncrasies provided the central tension for nearly every episode. One particularly endearing moment of this happens when Paddington, in the London Underground for the first time, sees a sign that says, “dogs must be carried” when going down an escalator. The bear does what anyone would do in that situation: he finds a tiny chihuahua and carries it down.
The franchise’s politics find their footing in a tiny bear proxy for refugees traveling north in search of a better life. Aunt Lucy insists to Paddington that Britons will not have forgotten how to be kind to strangers, and the film lets us sit in this fantasy, allowing us to imagine a world in which borders don’t exist and xenophobic paranoia is stuck at the fringes. Racism doesn’t not exist in Paddington—Windsor Gardens, where the Browns live, has at least one comically racist neighbor in the form of Peter Capaldi’s Reginald Curry—but that ignorance is simply the purview of wily cowards who too can be changed. Whether or not you think that’s naive is one thing, but remember that this is also a universe in which Peruvian bears can learn how to speak the King’s English and no one blinks an eye.
King wastes no time showing us Paddington’s inherent goodness. When he first arrives in London, Paddington camps out on the side of the train tracks. Unlikely to get food or shelter, he gives his last “emergency” marmalade sandwich to a pack of hungry pigeons. And this little bit of generosity is rewarded both to us and to the bear; in the former through narrative causality that Spielberg himself couldn’t dream of and in the latter as the pigeons end up being instrumental in saving Paddington from the deliciously evil Nicole Kidman. Good karma for those who deserve it.
It is this constant domino effect of goodness that makes the heart of King’s two films pound. In Paddington 2, the bear’s good nature and selflessness is able to transform an entire prison into what is essentially England’s largest fine bakery. Three of the prisoners (spearheaded by Brendan Gleeson’s lovable performance as a tough but comically vulnerable prison boss named Nuckles McGinty), give up their newfound freedom to help Paddington out of an underwater cage. Back home in Windsor Gardens, Paddington’s presence only elevates everyone’s lives. One neighbor would constantly forget his keys at home were it not for Paddington’s care, another would constantly be angry and depressed were it not for Paddington’s homemade marmalade, and two others find each other (and love) because of Paddington’s selflessness as a window washer (it’s a long story). There’s also the moment when Paddington witnesses a pickpocket drop a wallet; Paddington can’t fathom a world where thieves exist so he chases the man down to give the wallet back.
Most lasting change cannot happen at the individual level. But King knows that and doesn’t shy away from criticizing bad systems and actors who still govern his bear’s world. In the first film, before the Browns have fully accepted Paddington as a member of their family, Mr. Brown tries to explain where refugees go. He tells Paddington that most people find the place of someone they know, and Paddington replies: “What if you don’t know anybody?” Mr. Brown pauses, for a moment unsure what to say.
The whole series has a general distrust of institutional help, as when Mr. Brown calls an unknown-to-us government office and is told, “your call is moderately important to us.” Capaldi’s character Mr. Curry in the first film is simply a nosey xenophobe who tells the Browns he doesn’t want to hear Paddington’s “jungle” music, but in the second he’s evolved into... a cop. It can’t be an accident that King’s most obviously racist character is a police officer.
Paul King even reserves some criticism for ingrained colonialist attitudes. The Geographer’s Guild of the first film is horrified to learn that Montgomery Clyde, the explorer who found the bears, refused to bring the natives back with him. “These were no dumb beasts,” Clyde says in defense, “they were intelligent and civilized.” They respond, cruelly and hilariously, “Come off it, Clyde. They didn’t even speak English. Did they play cricket? Drink tea? Do the crossword? Pretty rum idea of civilization you’ve got, Clyde.” This scene makes it obvious that white supremacists want the whole world, even the global south, to live like them.
One area in which the Paddington films are under-appreciated is gender politics. Both films include comedian Simon Farnaby as a self-serious security guard named Barry who’s sexual attraction to middle-aged men in traditionally female clothing is presented without judgement. The comedy of those scenes come not from his attraction but in his blindness to the men behind the disguises. Bonneville’s Mr. Brown is a somewhat stiff man and feels uncomfortable in a woman’s clothing, but Paddington quite simply tells him, “you look very pretty.” Why should a bear have gender-based prejudice? Even Mr. Brown is forced to admit later when talking to his family that wearing women’s clothing was “very liberating.”
Along with his surprisingly astute politics, King’s wildly good on a formal level. Throughout both films, King pays homage to Michael Bond’s original literature by letting the camera travel on horizontal planes, introducing minor interstitials and side scenes in cross-sectioned monochromatic colors reminiscent of a children’s book. There are also nods to international cinema, like Tom Cruise’s suction-cup climb in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996), or the unusually red parasol akin to Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). King takes opportunities to bend the rules of space and time, like when he seamlessly brings us from our world into that of the pop-up book, showing us Paddington’s fantasy of ushering his beloved aunt around London. Then, later in prison, he plunges us into the lush Peruvian forest that only actually exists in the Paddington’s head.
None of this even takes into account the film’s first-rate comedy. There’s an exceptional moment in the first film when Mary Brown (played by the always luminescent Sally Hawkins) is reporting Paddington as missing to the police. She describes him as “three foot six, red hat, blue coat and... well, he’s a bear.” The police officer simply replies, “Well it’s not much to go on.” Mary: “... really?!”
Or how about the comedy in the entirety of Hugh Grant’s villainous performance of the second film? Grant’s turn is the best of his career, an absurdly self-congratulatory and hammy fading actor who steals the magical pop-up book because it leads to a treasure he hopes will fund his solo show. To repeat: he’s a villain who’s entire plan is to fund a solo show. Maybe the silliest motivation for a villain in the history of cinema.
If Paddington exists in a utopia in which most people have good intentions and even bad people have intentions that are adorably small minded, then it is also a world where circumstances and luck play large roles in the balance of justice. That Paddington is sent away for ten years in the second film for “Grand Theft” of a pop-up book is a hilariously cruel fate—but it allows us to see how Paddington and Aunt Lucy’s ethos of good manners above all else fare against its toughest competition: the prison industrial complex. It’d be a lot to assume a children’s movie could be abolitionist against police and prisons, but at the very least King does give us an image of prisoners who are only there because of mistakes, bad luck, and ingrained systematic cruelty—just like Paddington. In these instances, kindness can be the most effective salvo. This idea pervades every element of the production. Both films are accompanied by a delightful jam band that appears on screen and sings lyrics like, “life will be easier/ time will be breezier/ if you love your neighbor.”
Paddington resonates for people because he exists in a universe devoid of cynicism. Individual differentiation is appreciated, people can be helped simply by magnanimity, communities can exist via radical solidarity, capital gain is an inherently selfish endeavor, and goodness begets goodness. The Paddington movies aren’t just gooey reflections on home life, they are templates for community health and prosperity. Paddington, a refugee who only seeks happiness, friendship, and family as his vocations, inspires those around him to cultivate artistic passions, find lasting romantic love, pursue healthy careers, and embrace their truest selves rather than hide beyond artificial facades. The movie’s emotional ending resonates in part because King brings all of the people Paddington has helped to the front of the frame. Here’s what can happen if you live your life justly.
It would be enough of an enjoyable film if King had just told a simple story about a bear getting into hairy situations, but the synthesis of progressive politics with unquestionably affective pathos, told via first-rate animation and Chaplin-esque comedy, all through the prism of a refugee story, make Paddington and Paddington 2 top-tier contemporary cinema. Paddington teaches us that it's not only possible to treat others like our neighbors, but that it is imperative for our global survival. As Paddington says in a letter to his Aunt Lucy, “everyone is different, but that means anyone can fit in.”
Who cares if Paddington 2 is the best film of all time? Just like his precious marmalade, the films contain all the vitamins and minerals we need.