Paddington 2 (2017)

Showing Paddington 2 to someone new is a confession.

You’re admitting something about yourself more than about the film. That this is the one that made you want to be different. It’s a lot to say.

Paul King and Simon Farnaby wrote one of the tightest screenplays ever put to film. I put it next to Casablanca. Small gestures made in the first act return with weight in the third. The whole mechanism was sitting in the open the entire time, and you still gasp when it closes. All of this in 104 minutes with a talking bear in a red hat.

Paddington is an immigrant who doesn’t understand the customs of the country he’s arrived in. He gets things wrong. He stumbles through this new life, and what he refuses to do, even when the neighborhood he’s trying to love sends him to prison, is stop believing it can be better. The film is about a community that improves because someone keeps choosing kindness. The whole thing works like a machine and reads like a love story: a bear and a city learning to need each other.

I see myself in Paddington, but not the Paddington who moves through the world with such grace. I see myself as a kid, before I learned to be hurt and afraid. Paddington is who I’d be if I could find my way to that place, open enough to be that kind and that trusting. It’s a dream I have. He makes it feel possible.

I watched this most recently with someone new, someone who hadn’t seen it. That’s the vulnerable version of watching it: you’ve already told them it matters to you, and then you sit there hoping they see what you see.

I think they did.

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