It was on the flight home from my father’s funeral that I first met Paddington. In search of an easy watch to take our minds off things, my partner, David, and I thought a movie about the adventures of a C.G.I. bear in a floppy red hat might do the trick. We went in cold, neither of us having grown up with the children’s books.
If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know this was a naïve, if not poor decision in a time of grief. Almost immediately, Paddington, already an orphan, loses his Uncle Pastuzo in a cataclysmic earthquake in Peru. Soon after, his Aunt Lucy tells him that he must find a new home — alone, without her. Orphaned doubly in the first 10 minutes. I began to cry.
Since I was a child, I had been consumed with my father’s needs and longed not to be the parent to my parent. Poor Paddington, forced to navigate the world of adults.
The “Paddington” films have acted as a strange benchmark. At 31, I watched the first movie the day after laying my father to rest in a pine box, and the sequel, which was pure delight and offered a reprieve from the darkness of mourning, a few months later. By the time “Paddington in Peru,” the third movie, is released on Feb. 14 in the United States, it will be nearly two years since my father passed. The series has become an unexpected grief tracker; Paddington, my fortuitous companion.
My father and I had, at best, a complicated relationship, as he had with just about everyone. An addict with more than a few mental health disorders and, later, dementia, he’d burned bridges with anyone who tried to offer that fleeting, suffocating thing called help.
There were years of unemployment, stints in rehab, bouts of disappearances and countless emergency-room visits. I thought I had “pre-grieved,” to borrow a term from Roman Roy, so the ripples of hopelessness and thoughts of what’s the point of it all? that followed his death arrived as a sick aftershock. I was emptied.
On the plane, as I watched this innocent little bear, with his unshakable optimism and impeccable manners, experience loss after loss, that emptiness grew until it blackened the whole of me from the inside out. I’d been tricked by a children’s film. David reached out to hold my hand.
Aunt Lucy tells Paddington that he must go to London, the birthplace of an explorer she and Uncle Pastuzo once hosted. She places a luggage tag around Paddington’s neck that says, “Please take care of this bear.” I winced, wishing someone would do the same for me.
But, Paddington protests, he doesn’t know anyone in London.
“There was once a war in the explorer’s country,” Aunt Lucy gently explains. “Thousands of children were sent away for safety, left at railway stations with tags around their necks, and unknown families took them in and loved them like their own.”
This time, I wasn’t the only one trying to hold it together. David, a grandson of two Holocaust survivors, turned to me, and we erupted in sobs. We paused the film and leaned our foreheads together, weeping, letting our shoulders rattle the tray tables as we convulsed.
David’s paternal grandmother — his safta, Frieda Scheindling — escaped the war in 1939 via the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England. Frieda, 14, boarded a train alone, leaving behind her parents and older sister. All were killed in the concentration camps.
In London, Frieda was sent to an orphanage and later adopted by an English couple who raised her as their own. An unfathomable gift.
The Kindertransport was a relatively small operation, rescuing a fraction of the children facing death, and was cut short by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Seeing it referenced in a movie unrelated — or so we thought — to the Holocaust left us stunned.
Paddington, eyes glossed over in despair, asks, “What if they don’t even like bears?” Aunt Lucy reassures him that the good people of London “will not have forgotten how to treat a stranger.”
As David and I later learned, the author Michael Bond based Paddington on the refugee children with tags around their necks that he as a child watched arrive at the train station in Reading, just outside London.
When our hero arrives on the platform at Paddington, the station he gets his name from, he asks, “Does anyone know where I can find a home?” He, too, is taken in by kind strangers in London: the Brown family. Though not without reserve.
Mr. Brown, played by Hugh Bonneville, sees Paddington as a safety hazard; neighbors are skeptical — some fearful — of the new addition; strangers roll their eyes. They pick and choose who is deserving of their compassion. But Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins) accepts his fur and quirky hygiene habits wholeheartedly. She is a match for Paddington’s own disposition — benevolence.
And set to the joyful music of a calypso band, he soon befriends others with similar backgrounds, like Mr. Gruber (Jim Broadbent), an eccentric antiques dealer whose arrival in London sounds awfully familiar.
At the antiques shop, overflowing with bronze sculptures and ornate lamps, a train snakes through to dispense tea. Paddington follows in awe.
“Just like a train I was on many years ago,” Mr. Gruber tells him. “There was trouble in my country, so my parents sent me all the way across Europe. I was not much older than you are now.”
Paddington peers into the rail car to find a small boy, scared and alone, a label around his neck. David and I paused to cry some more.
The Jewish themes kept coming: Paddington as a stowaway on a boat (how my own great-grandfather Saul was said to have escaped pogroms in Poland before the war); Paddington written off as “a most unpleasant creature” in complaints by nosy neighbors; Paddington escaping death — from a vampy, taxidermy-obsessed Nicole Kidman — while trapped in an incinerator, surrounded by flames. When the credits rolled, David and I held onto each other, bleary-eyed, blindsided.
LATER IN THE YEAR, when the grief was fresh, but not raw, we watched the sequel. This time we were not so green. We knew to expect a gut punch and braced accordingly.
But any heaviness was immediately tempered by Paddington’s usual antics and a new villain: a delightfully silly Hugh Grant with a penchant for elaborate disguises and magic tricks.
With its Wes Anderson-like whimsy and escape capers, it is my — and many others’ — favorite of the three.
In it, Paddington has happily settled into London and the routines of life with the Browns. My own life hadn’t settled in quite the same way — my living situation was in limbo, my health a mess — but it was moving in that direction, and it was a comfort to see my fellow wanderer had found his way. I was rooting him on, and maybe rooting for myself, too.
Paddington’s perpetual assumption of good will disarms even the most hardened of criminals, earning him allies at every turn.
Here was Paddington with an entourage of friends! Here was Paddington getting a job (albeit one he promptly loses)! Here was Paddington sleeping easily each night, knowing he is loved.
I, still clinging to bitterness and self-pity, envied his sense of belonging, but there was also hope, quietly peeking through.
WITH “PADDINGTON IN PERU,” time has worked its miraculous alchemy. Nearly two years have passed since the funeral. This movie, the third in the series, is centered on Paddington’s return trip to his native Peru, with the Browns in tow. The calypso band is traded in for a cumbia ensemble, its up-tempo chik-chika beats a reminder that I am no longer sodden with despair.
It helps, too, that the film is replete with high jinks even more ridiculous than the others. Olivia Colman, wearing a nun’s habit and wielding a guitar, plays the baddie; Antonio Banderas is a swaggering, gold-crazy ship captain.
Still, I cried at the opening — a flashback to baby Paddington, all on his own, clutching a log in a perilous river — and at the end, which shows Paddington with his bear tribe in present day. I couldn’t help but think of David’s Safta, what she would have given to see her family again, to take a group photo.
David and I are getting married later this year. We’ll exchange vows under a huppah with white linens that belonged to Safta. My dad won’t be there to walk me down the aisle. Even if he were alive, the truth is that I don’t know if I would invite him. His demons were contagious.
The beauty of mourning, with the advantage of hindsight, is to be able to take the admirable and leave the rest. Individual grief, so entwined with intergenerational sorrow, can feel like an inheritance passed down to harden the heart. But what Paddington perhaps offers above all else is choice. The choice to be gracious, and to extend grace. The choice to resist the urge toward selective compassion. The choice to disrupt, against all odds, cycles of suffering.
Paddington doesn’t gorge on sadness, as I’ve been known to do. His story is one of resilience.
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