When I was seven years old, my Dad wouldn’t let me go to the Disney version of P.L. Travers “Mary Poppins” till I wrote a one page review of the children’s book. I wrote large but it was difficult. Still, it was worth the slog of and Dad kept his word and to this day “Mary Robbins” remains a benchmark of youth for me.
In “Saving Mr. Banks”, the Disneyfication of the pre-production behind “Mary Poppins”, the backstory becomes one of children and their fathers. Emma Thompson’s extremely bad tempered PL Travers is mourning who beloved father who died when Travers was a child, and she invented Mary Poppins to save her father in the figure of Mr. Banks. Meanwhile Tom Hank’s Walt Disney has his own father issues, Disney’s father had Walt and his brother Roy delivering his fathers newspapers twice a day on foot in the snow, at the age of eight and the Mr. Banks he approves for the movie is a monster. In the end they compromise and come to terms with their fathers and themselves.
Except it isn’t quite true.
Travers gave the rights to Mary Poppins to Disney because she was broke, cried all the way through the movie because she hated it and would only give the rights to a West End musical if no Americans were involved. In the movie Travers decries the lack of subtlety and the overt sentimentality. She saw Mary Poppins as a no nonsense woman there to set Mr. Banks above all else back on the right path. The reasons for Travers truculence is explained through flashbacks to the young Australian girl Ginty and her loving relationship with her father. Each outburst as Travers and the writers of the movie work through the script is explained with a flashback.
“Saving Mr. Banks” isn’t a great movie, though, it is the right daydream for me, and among the reasons why it is good for me is not just my empathy with a father dying early in his child’s life but also my worship of the Shermans, Robert and Richard, composer and songwriter of the astounding songs, the equal of Rodgers and Hammerstein in places, in “Mary Poppins”. I remember reading an autobiography of Irving Berlin explaining how he wrote “Blue Skies” with blue notes, counter intuitive and there is a scene in “Saving Mr. Banks” where the brothers realize that in “A Spoonful Of Sugar” the note should go UP on the downward “helps the medicine go down” which is just wonderful. Perfection. You and I live for it.
The acting is uniformly excellent, Colin Farrell is charming and a the sort of man you can imagine a daughter worshipping in as the domed father, Paul Giamatti as Travers L.A. chauffeur has something of the Jiminy Cricket in him, Jason Schwartzman excellent as Richard Sherman, and Tom Hanks astounding as the Walt Disney of your dreams. But Emma Thompson as the slowly thawing deeply unhappy PL Traver makes the movie despite all its attempts to be a feel good show, a real experience.
Still it isn’t true and it sure hits me that it is the second time they have destroyed Travers very British vision and mushed it up for Americans.
Fortunately for them, I’m a mus myself.
Grade: B+