The People’s Prince
It didn’t quite make the top spot, but one film stole the hearts of so many when we shared our list of the greatest British films of the 21st century: Paddington 2. But what is it about the film, this unassuming sequel, that makes it so special? Ella Kemp calmly breaks it down.
Once upon a time, there lived a little bear from darkest Peru called Paddington Brown. He’s a kind little bear who loves marmalade sandwiches, seeing the sights of London, and spending time with his family. Of course, those two sentences enough might be calming enough to soothe anybody’s weary mind for a minute, but there is a singular alchemic magic to Paul King’s two Paddington films that digs deeper, that lifts this bear up and makes Paddington the people’s prince. He’s saved us, but how? Can one little bear really do so much?
I remember seeing Paddington 2 for the first time, in 2017. I hadn’t seen the first one, was assured that wouldn’t matter, and couldn’t really believe what I saw. I wondered if it was me, not having seen all that many films, a bit too excited to be part of something as the rest of the world was so excited. But I wasn’t wrong. It’s five years later and Paddington 2 only becomes more miraculous with every watch.
It’s important to establish that Paddington 2, plot-wise, sort of makes no sense as a sequel and really doesn’t make sense any way you slice it. After arriving in London, trying to find a home, swerving a generic villain and settling in with the Brown family, we find Paddington at the start of the second film fairly settled. Fine. Things kick into gear with the birthday of Paddington’s Aunt Lucy, so he wants to get a job to buy her a birthday present… Sure. When he finds the book he wants to buy, though, he ends up being framed for theft and sent to prison while a narcissistic, greedy actor gallivants across London looking for hidden treasure. Like, are you sure about this one? Oh and then they fight it out on a steam train and Paddington gets rescued from an underwater death. Am I hallucinating?
But it works. Somehow. If it was just a case of relying on the softness of this bear, on a quaint depiction of London, on the reliance on existing IP to just bob us along to the finish line, it would sink. There is a lot of talk, among a certain demographic and very online community, of Paddington 2 being a masterpiece, but I do worry we’ve jumped to such superlatives as something of a joke, a meme, a trend, without actually calmly unpacking and dissecting why, actually, it’s true. Almost scientifically.
The greatest thing about both Paddington films, with the first one being perfectly solid and the second one an undeniable masterpiece, is how surprising they are. At once subversive and comforting, the films smartly twist little details of daily life in London to either make them sillier, or more special, or just a little lighter. In the first film, teenager Judy Brown “suffers from a serious condition called embarrassment”. Later, Paddington balances on one leg while clutching a chihuahua on an escalator down to the tube, as he sees a sign telling him to stand on the right, and another stressing that dogs must be carried.
In the second film, in moments of extreme darkness, Paddington tells his prison guard that Mrs Brown usually reads him a story before bed. “I don’t suppose…” he begins, before writing a letter to Aunt Lucy from his cell trying to reassure her that “it’s one of the most substantial Victorian buildings in London”. This bear is so pure of heart, but he’s also so intelligent. You know that way your parents would bend the truth of something objectively bleak or horrifying to make it a little more fun for you? Paddington walks that tightrope magnificently, with humour that feels like a double somersault while somehow adding a safety net below in case you slip up.
And there is visual beauty, too, that extends beyond the familiar comfort of the bear, his little red hat, his warm navy duffle coat. See it in the way sunlight breaks through a stiff, dusty window when Paddington cleans it, in the shimmer of primary-colour stained glass windows in Phoenix Buchanan’s eccentric home. The accidental sweetness of a canteen of prison inmates wearing marshmallow-pink jumpsuits.
This is, of course, a love letter to London, and it’s in these gentle, unceremonious details that you really remember how to find the beauty in whichever city, town or village you might find yourself in – if you just tilt your head a little, and breathe out slightly differently. “He looks for the good in all of us, and somehow he finds it,” Mr Brown tells us. However – somebody who doesn’t look for anything good yet gives us one of the greatest parts of this film is, naturally, Phoenix Buchanan.
While Nicole Kidman did her best in the first film to play the film’s villain – whose name I could research but for the sake of honesty I will say has, in so many rewatches, never once made an impact on me – what Hugh Grant does as Phoenix Buchanan, here, is just unprecedented. Here is a man the nation knows and loves so well, a man who has been playing on that fact for the last three decades by swapping between Hugh Grant With The Floppy Hair And Accidentally Seductive Yet Allegedly Awkward Sex Appeal and Hugh Grant Has Lots Of Money And An Important Job And An Annoyingly Good Sense Of Humour That Makes Up For Him (Character, Not Actor, Mind) Probably Being a Tory.
There is no inbetween, and it’s always worked – which is why to play the role of a chameleonic, arrogant, deluded actor who thrives on his ability to take old costumes out of storage both suits his abilities and showcases them in new ways. An attractive nun, a bearded robber, a Hamlet with an immaculate Scottish accent, he can do it all. It’s gloriously camp yet never too far. He’s having the time of his life and that usually shouldn’t be enough, but this isn’t a usual sequel. Everything about it is a quiet bit of genius .
Paddington 2 is bursting at the seams with meticulous, loving detail with less fanfare than all of Phoenix’s moments – as much in the script (he’s a bin, just a normal bin going for a walk) as the production design (the prisoners’ dessert parlour!) and every emotional beat that takes this, and us, into the stratosphere. It’s for all these plain, hard, true reasons that the film has earned the wildly hyperbolic and sometimes delirious love that it has.
It’s a film that dares to be ever so slightly different, and to welcome us all in. It’s so exceptional because it celebrates all the things that are not. It is small, and it is soft, and it just wants the world to be a little more kind, and a little more polite. Please look after this film. Thank you.
Read the full results of our Best British Film of the 21st Century poll here.
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