The classic story template follows a conflict-resolution arc, leading sequels to be stressed with a pressure to constantly surpass their predecessors. Over enough time and with the inundation of sequels in Hollywood, this has manifested into a general pervasive cynicism across mainstream films. Action movies must have bigger explosions or more brutal violence to distinguish themselves.
Dramas have evolved into increasingly disturbing psychological thrillers in an attempt to retain some sense of impact on the viewer. Even comedies provide the promised delivery of humorous laughter at the expense of some degree of cynicism and mockery. A tone of unprovocative mellowness is generally relegated to low risk Oscar bait and feel-good schlock destined for the waiting couches of car dealerships and rainy half movie days hosted by middle school teachers.
Paddington eschews this outcome even through its sequels by delivering its message with merciless sincerity. The trilogy wields the same efficient formula for emotional tension and release which Pixar had once championed, a resignation to catharsis by tugging on the weakest spots of buried feelings towards family, kindred human connection, and the burgeoning stranglehold of modern life. Watching a Paddington movie and reaching the familiar moment of sentimental apotheosis feels like being a grasshopper slowly crushed between the enclosing walls of a Venus flytrap, licking the syrupy nectar as one final meal and accepting fate with earnest congratulation at being outplayed.
It was a scene in Nicolas Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - where Cage watches Paddington 2 and declares it the greatest film ever made through tears - that first drew me to the series. Like Cage's character, I found myself completely disarmed by its sincerity.
I had no pretensions of Paddington In Peru outdoing its previous installment. The second Paddington movie was uniquely gripping in a manner which even the first could not reach, likely due to not having the burden of establishing the character's origins.
Paddington In Peru begins by hinting towards America's domination over a faded British economy. The father's insurance business is purchased by a US company which discards a series of stereotypically British insurance manuals laden with bureaucratic safety regulations, proclaiming a new paradigm of bold risk taking as the CEO skydives out of an open office window. This plot point has no purpose beyond acting as the catalyst for the father (who has his character arc of gaining courage reset for every movie) to overcome his fears and fulfill some risky action that saves his family. Yet, it serves as a curious admission of America's actionable rashness as a positive trait for the British people to learn from and shake off the malaise of their relative economic and cultural decay.
The entire plot of Paddington In Peru, as in every other Paddington movie, is delivered amidst a series of lovable doofus slapstick routines, a pure form of comedy with universal digestibility harkening back to the Silent Age of filmmaking. Between pratfalls and spilled props, Paddington finally receives his British passport affirming his citizenship. In some form of poetic symbolism, he is promptly congratulated by a neighborhood assembly of smiling minorities handing him the gift of an iconic gentleman's cane umbrella synonymous with British identity.
Shortly after, Paddington receives a letter from his Aunt Lucy, an elderly bear occupying a home for retired bears run by Catholic nuns nestled deep in the Peruvian Amazon. The entire family gets roped into following Paddington to Peru so that he may visit his Aunt and alleviate her loneliness while investigating the strange tone of the letter. Upon arrival, the excessively toothy grinned British head nun reveals that Aunt Lucy disappeared promptly before the family's landing. Some hidden trinkets and a hand scrawled treasure map initiates the whimsical journey into uncharted Amazonian jungles, a 1930's pulp adventure novel quest for the lost city of El Dorado acting as the backdrop.
The movie's aesthetic adheres to the child appealing exaggeration of size and color, similar to the amusement park set piece motifs of a Spy Kids movie, albeit toned down in comparison by what one can only assume is an underlying “Yookay” sensibility. The best way to convey how a Paddington movie looks is by picturing a playpit built into the corner of a DMV. You get hints of silly proportion conveying the universal childlike perspective of a large world waiting to be explored, yet there's always that drabness of mundanity lurking around the edges.
Paddington as a character has always contained a subtext of England’s changing demographics. The basic premise of Paddington as a third world migrant refugee being sheltered charitably in a British household was directly inspired by World War 2 refugee children carrying tags around their necks. The townspeople of Paddington's neighborhood represent a tan rainbow of multiracial diversity, each smiling placidly in support of their cherubic bear immigrant newcomer hosted by the Brown family, its members embodying hokey English stereotypes. The distinctly white British neighborhood watchman who acts as the sole outspoken opposition to this outsider is depicted as a buffoon in all three films, a foil for mockery against close-mindedness. Paddington was always a story idealizing the acceptance of immigrant outsiders, a staple of British culture so iconic that a Paddington Bear stuffed toy was chosen as the first object to be passed to the French counterparts upon the completion of the Channel Tunnel under the Strait of Dover.
But Paddington In Peru sees the bear leave Britain for an adventure in the exotic New World, and in doing so stumbles into a number of disturbing forays into esoteric symbolism, religious subtext, and social metaphors that ultimately tie back into the basic question of Paddington’s British identity.
The movie implies the Vatican's subtle attempts to convert bears to Catholicism by having missionary nuns run a home for retired bears deep within the Amazon, a futile endeavor as everyone knows that the entire ursine taxonomy has been firmly colonized by Orthodox Christianity since Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Sergius of Radonezh established faithful communion with Kamatchka brown bears in the name of Russian Orthodoxy, eschewing the inroad attempts made by St Corbinius on behalf of Pope Saint Gregory III in 720 AD.
Antonio Banderas chews the scenery as a white suited riverboat captain, unveiled in heroic pose next to an old timey gramophone as part of an unsubtle ongoing callback to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. He abandons his duty in safely ferrying the Brown family along the Amazon river as his dive into insanity in search of El Dorado (a predictable villain reveal, as every Paddington antagonist is played by the most famous cast member) fulfills the Aguirre, the Wrath of God plot allusion and completes the reference checklist for the only two famous movies anyone has ever watched about Peru.
The film's esoteric mythological symbolism grows more fevered as Paddington ventures deeper into Peru. A great Incan bear statue roars into his conscious blood memories via intrusive hallucinations, while Incan acoustic resonators carved from stone mimic his aunt's curdling screams. The zesty Spanish riverboat captain embodies colonial identity crisis as his treasure hunting ancestors possess him with uncontrollable wrath, forcing him to chase Paddington through labyrinthian Incan ruins with a dull machete in hopes of stealing Paddington’s birthright trinket which holds the key to finding El Dorado, revealed to be a grand mystical valley of sentient bears harvesting "gold" oranges (Hyperbearea).
Forest spirits loom as mysterious leaf-covered shroud monsters (Espiritus del Bosque), while ancestor veneration is villainized as animistic idolatry, a conquistador flavored schizophrenia haunting the cursed riverboat captain as subconscious commentary on Latin American racial identity. Curiously, every Paddington film touches upon redeeming ancestral sins through its antagonist's motives, here crystallized as a subtle allusion to human sacrifice rituals in the captain's choice between gold and his daughter's life.
The head nun gifts the family mother a Saint Christopher medallion which secretly contains a surveillance tracker, conveying an incoherent mixture of suspicious criticism and rightful justification which mirrors Britain's own conflicted relationship with its MI6 backed extensive CCTV network surveillance state. Saint Christopher's legend of ferrying an anonymous child (revealed as Christ) across dangerous waters pairs suspiciously with Paddington's immortal child stature and his revelation as the chosen bear necessary to find El Dorado, a metaphor for gaining entrance to heaven through the implication that all who seek the City of Gold end up dying.
The film's haphazard accumulation of mythological references ultimately paints a psychedelic subtext of Pagan-Christian synthesis and occult wisdom that, like Paddington himself, somehow coheres into a meditation on outsider identity and belonging.
These metaphors and symbols are innocent in intent, no more depth is placed behind them than any other throwaway joke Paddington In Peru offers. Yet, meaning is derived through unintentional impulse driving the decisions of any creator.
The smattering of symbolic references layered throughout Paddington convey a deeper message to the viewer, even if the message is unintentional. Each Paddington film endeavors to faithfully uphold Paddington as an iconic staple of English culture and a symbol representing Great Britain as a whole.
As classic London gentleman verbiage and how-do-you-do tea and crumpets motifs of a bygone era get juxtaposed against the highlighter yellow vests and mobile app city biking Pakistani delivery driver aesthetics of fluorescent urban modernity, it can seem like Paddington's creators are intentionally enacting some form of political subversion, a sort of propagandistic framework similar to the crude Marxist Afro-utopic queer maximalism which will historically define American media during the 2010s. However, this is not the case for the Paddington trilogy.
When the precocious little bear cheerfully returns greetings to the diversity pamphlet background characters occupying his peripheral existence, there is no underlying seething dismay. There is no hint of ulterior discomforting truth needing to be suppressed by virtue signal sloganeering. Paddington is not intrinsically subversive nor does it attempt to be. The writers are not attempting to instill an ideal of what British culture should become, they are candidly revealing what they feel British culture already is: A melting pot of identity and outsider acceptance beyond any historic ethnic precedent.
Through the very same sentimental sincerity which so powerfully yields emotional catharsis from the audience, true subversion is achieved at a magnitude your average nepo baby Netflix slop writer's room can only dream of inflicting. And because of this acceptant clarity, the modern interpretation of Paddington actually succeeds at its goal. Paddington perfectly portrays British culture as it truly is, holding up an unblemished mirror to reflect the current state of the United Kingdom in stark lucidity.
As the movie reaches its resolution and Paddington reunites with both his ancestral tribe and his adoptive mother in a tear wrenching tsunami of sentimental catharsis, he wraps up the underlying question of his cultural identity and place of belonging.
He turns away from his bear tribe birthplace and asks the Brown family who have adopted and housed him for years whether it would be alright if he returned to Britain with them. The 'noble savage'— in this case, literally a savage animal—has decided he wants to no longer be savage and wants to adopt the ways of Western civilization. It's as backhanded an acknowledgment that 'the West is best' as I've ever seen, though that being said, the final scene delivers the most haunting message the movie has to offer, a pun so blatantly admissive that you can't help but wonder how deliberately it's presented:
The Brown family's household now contains half a dozen new bears romping around and mimicking Paddington's mischievous chaos. Paddington explains how the family has adopted several more members of his extended migrant family and he opines that, while he has some Peruvian in him, and some British in him, most of all he is “a whole lot of Brown."
Staring blankly at the cheerful credits, I couldn't help but agree.