One Thing I Love About Paddington in Peru

I haven’t yet seen either of the first two Paddington movies, although they’re high on my to-watch list since they seem to be universally beloved. The beginning of Paddington in Peru, the third installment, didn’t just quickly get me up to speed. It welcomed me into the family with a huge smile and a hug.

The entire movie is filled with so much unrestrained joy, and I hadn’t appreciated how much I needed that until I found myself at the end, sobbing in the theater from sheer happiness.

Early in the movie, there’s a scene in which Paddington receives his British passport in the mail, and a semicircle of British character actors are all around to congratulate him and to give him a gift. It’s immediately obvious that they’re characters from the earlier films, returning for a brief cameo. It also seemed obvious to me that they were all delighted to be there, and they were eager to come back. Their smiles all radiated a sense of joy and kindness that was contagious. It was impossible not to smile back. I don’t know these characters’ names, but I already consider them my friends.

In the same batch of introductory scenes, we see Paddington’s host father Mr Brown at his job in London. He’s delivering a presentation to his new boss, who is explicitly described as American, and who’s played by Haley Atwell.¹Who I learned later is of dual British and American citizenship, so maybe her casting isn’t as odd as I’d originally thought. Again, I got the sense that she’d jumped at the chance to appear in the movie, doing an accent, just so she could be part of something so delightful.

And speaking of delightful, there’s also Olivia Colman playing a singing nun at a home for retired bears who’s not at all suspicious. She never seems to be trying to steal the scene, yet she always does, proving once again that she’s one of the best living actors. With just a subtle shift in facial expression, she can take the attention from an entire pack of CG bears doing physical comedy.

My overriding sense from the movie was that everyone involved was delighted to be there, and they’d all jumped at the opportunity to come back for the third movie. So I was surprised to learn afterwards that the director of the first two hadn’t returned, and more surprisingly, that the character of Mrs Brown had been recast from Sally Hawkins to Emily Mortimer. Surprising because that character is the emotional core of the movie, and Mortimer seemed as if she’d always been there. Considering how quickly I started thinking of Paddington as a real bear instead of a computer-generated creation, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised that good actors are good at acting.

It’s such a needlessly beautiful movie, as well, with animated sequences going into Mrs Brown’s paintings, a cross-section of the house illustrating her anxiety over becoming an empty nester, and later, a series of period flashbacks showing the adventures of Antonio Banderas’s ancestors (each played by Banderas). It struck me as such a joyful expression of artistry that it made me even more disappointed that this has become the outlier, and the standard for family movies is to throw as many Hollywood movie stars into the cast as possible to disguise the fact that they’re completely soulless. During the depressing parade of trailers before Paddington in Peru, I saw one for The Smurfs that felt as if an icy spectral hand had reached out of the screen and wrapped around my heart. Then the trailer for the Minecraft movie felt like the hand squeezing.

Whether Paddington in Peru adequately captured the magic of the previous movies, I can’t say. But it’s also irrelevant, because I was completely delighted by all of it. There’s such a sense of kindness throughout that might seem overly juvenile in its pure simplicity, but is in vanishingly short supply since so many of us seem to have forgotten it.

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  Who I learned later is of dual British and American citizenship, so maybe her casting isn’t as odd as I’d originally thought.