There are notable exceptions. Mary Poppins (1964) is a class act; but then, Jane and Michael are really never all that awful, and never once do they get a hold of the ketchup. And Home Alone (1990) broke the mold, too, with child and parents trying to make up for what they’ve done throughout. The little boy’s antics are in defense of his home rather than deliberate resistance to authority, and the father is not the bad guy.

And yesterday I discovered another exception: Nanny McPhee (2005). I had never heard of this film and, had I not been invited to join—with my children—a friend and her children, I might have missed it entirely. But when I heard that it starred Colin Firth, whose smoldering looks from across a 19th-century drawing room in Pride and Prejudice (1995) could set any heart ablaze, I was interested. And when I heard that Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay—the same Emma Thompson who wrote a smashing screenplay for Sense and Sensibility (1995)—and that, moreover, Ms. Thompson played the lead. . . . Well, I was definitely in.

Here is a lovely film. Director Kirk Jones paints it as a fairy tale, and it has all the trappings: dead mother, despairing father, a cook and two business partners teetering on the brink of crazy, a pending stepmother of the wicked variety, and magic. Cedric Brown has seven children who have, between them, chased away seventeen nannies. They don’t go to bed when told, they don’t get up when told. They don’t say “please” or “thank you,” and they never listen.

The film has what children love about the Disobedient Children film. When first we meet the children, one of them is guillotining some baby dolls. They almost convince their father that they’ve eaten Baby Aggie. They put caviar in the teapot, worms in the tea sandwiches, and dress the pig and donkey in their best clothing. Daddy Brown doesn’t have it easy. He takes a tumble down the stairs (an almost obligatory event in this genre) and thoroughly embarrasses himself more than once.

It sounds like precisely the kind of movie I hate. But Jones, as I said, sets out to create a fairy tale. Rather than setting his story in a perfectly-decorated-and-therefore-highly-destroyable home in an American suburb, Jones chooses a rambling Victorian house somewhere in the English countryside, a house whose colors, inside and out, surprise, delight, and sometimes shock us. The house looks loved and neglected; we believe that a mother only just recently lived and loved there, and we immediately begin to root for Evangeline, the scullery maid, to take the mother’s place.

But proper men like Cedric Brown do not marry scullery maids, and this Cedric Brown has a wretched aunt who is a Lady, of all things. He cannot think—indeed, would not think—of such a thing. No, this man needs more immediate help. He needs someone who will take his children in hand and get them to behave.

Enter—you guessed it—Nanny McPhee, whose countenance implicates her as a witch in this modern day fairy tale. Her solemn black clothing stands in stark contrast to the house’s riotous color; her curt hum of disapproval is barely audible against the children’s din. Her ugliness revolts the children, her magic confuses them, her suggestion that they might someday want her is utterly preposterous.

Nonetheless, the children find themselves obeying her. They find themselves trusting her. And they learn their lessons.

The film’s resolution is utter magic—magic of the McPhee variety and of the cinematic. Firth’s portrayal of the beleaguered father coming to terms with his failure is honest and sweet; the children’s relief in finally commanding their father’s attention is informed by the relief that comes in obedience: here are children finally secure in their father’s love, despite the fact that, at this point, the family is not out of danger.

But the character I loved the most was, of course, Nanny McPhee, whose warts, swollen nose, snaggle tooth, and wiry hair made her the most ugly of all nannies. In the midst of the appalling magic she works on the children, a quieter, almost unnoticeable magic unfolds throughout: whenever the children learn one of their lessons, one aspect of her ugliness fades away until, at the very end, there is Emma Thompson, still clad in black, and quietly radiant.

Jones makes less and less of this transformation as the film progresses. When the first warts fade, we are treated to a close-up. But as Nanny McPhee grows more beautiful, we are caught up in all the magic on the screen: the father’s heart turned toward his children, the children taking pleasure in obedience, the confession of love that looks on the heart rather than on one’s social status. In the end, Nanny McPhee is beautiful, and we are fairly certain that she has been beautiful all along. It was this aspect of the fairy tale that moved me most: the ones we love are beautiful indeed, no matter what they look like.