Review of Saving Mr. Banks (2013) by Kenneth L — 02 Aug 2014

This is a decently well-acted and entertaining little movie, though I was not surprised to learn that Disney has sugarcoated some of the facts to make itself look better. It's definitely unusual for a movie studio to make a movie about its own past history, and so this film is of interest as a "behind-the-scenes" sort of story at the very least. I was curious to see how collaborative the making of Mary Poppins apparently was, and the mixture of creativity and business savvy that Walt Disney embodied. If the movie is propaganda for the Walt Disney Corporation, it's at least charming propaganda.

Emma Thompson plays P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, and in the movie an exceedingly prim and demanding woman. We learn that Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, typically avuncular) has been trying to convince her for twenty years to sell him the rights to adapt Mary Poppins into a film, much to her chagrin. Needing money, however, she finally might be willing to agree to it, if the studio can meet all of her fastidious, sometimes insane demands and specifications. Most of the movie is taken up with the details of the adaptation process, and gets a lot of comedy of the conflict between the happy-go-lucky showbiz types working for Disney and the stern Britishness of Mrs. Travers. There are also rather sentimental (but effective) flashbacks to Travers's childhood in Australia in 1909, where her father is played by Colin Farrell.

Overall, it's a nice, pleasant movie, with Disney's typical polish. The performances are solid - it's the sort of movie that can afford to use Paul Giamatti and Jason Schwartzman in tiny supporting roles. Emma Thompson is obviously given the best role, and the movie does have some moments where the juxtapositions of flashback and present-tense scenes help us see the depth in her performance. Tom Hanks is charming as Walt Disney, though his makeup looks a bit odd in a few shots. The idea of locating the origins of Mary Poppins in Travers's personal psychological past is interesting, and the movie does it well, though it could have done a bit more with the "real-life" Mary Poppins than it does, perhaps. Insofar as the movie is an exploration of the mind of P.L. Travers, it's reasonably successful; insofar as it's Disney's advertisement for itself, it's still well-done but definitely a bit too self-congratulatory.