Nanny McPhee (2005)

Nanny McPhee arrives in 2005 with a wart, a walking stick, and a screenplay by Emma Thompson, and it conducts itself with the tidy conscience of a Victorian nursery manual. Seven children have driven off seventeen nannies. A widowed undertaker needs order. The remedy is magic, manners, and a few hard lessons about responsibility. None of this constitutes a cultural insurgency. The film instructs, but it instructs the way a governess instructs: firmly, briefly, and with a spoonful of jam.

The casting is a uniformly white British affair, and the film never pauses to remark on it. The Victorian setting is a storybook backdrop, not a site of historical revision. Race, climate, neurodivergence, and any question of queerness are absent as themes, and their absence is not conspicuous because the film has no interest in them. The body politics are, if anything, retrograde: Nanny McPhee's warts and snaggletooth disappear as the children improve, which frames physical defect as a symptom to be cured by good behavior. A modern sensitivity reader would have notes. The film does not care.

There is a mild class thread in Evangeline, the illiterate scullery maid who dreams of education and ends up marrying the master. This is gentle social comedy, not a redistributionist manifesto, and the wedding resolves the plot in the traditional domestic order. Capable women populate the film, but they are not making an argument. The moral lessons arrive through whimsy, not sermonizing. The most radical gesture on offer is a pastry fight at a wedding. We classify it accordingly: a charming, well-tailored artifact of an earlier dispensation, with no designs on the current cultural conversation.