Ryan McNeil
There’s a moment late in SAVING MR. BANKS where Walt Disney is making a plea for P.L. Travers to entrust the character of Mary Poppins to him. He appeals to her sensibility as a storyteller, suggesting that fellow storytellers – like himself – take great pains to understand what characters stand for. He suggests that he will be respectful with her work, and allow her creations to come to life and inspire in ways that will make her proud. It’s a pity the storytellers recounting that moment between two storytellers didn’t understand what their characters stood for.
In 1961, author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) reluctantly boarded a plane from London to Los Angeles. She flew half way around the world to meet with a man who had been asking for a meeting for twenty years. A man who had become an icon of the 20th century: Walt Disney (Tom Hanks). Travers, you see, was the author of a beloved series of children’s books about a nanny named Mary Poppins, and Disney deeply wanted to adapt the character for the big screen.
After twenty years, and a bit of hard financial luck, Travers reluctantly agreed. The agreement came with several conditions, chief amongst them that she have a great deal of creative control. So it was that she arrived at Disney Studios to work with co-writer Don DaGradi (Brad Whitford), and composers The Sherman Brothers – Robert and Richard (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman) on the creation of the film.
However, the collaboration proves difficult. Travers isn’t on-board with the whimsy Disney wants to apply to her property, and Disney is understanding about the rationale behind why Mary Poppins and her fellow characters are who they are. Travers appears to be deeply invested in the lives of these fictional beings, and for good reason…they are inspired by events from her childhood.
The film continually flips back to her childhood in Australia in the early years of the century. It was there that her parents (Colin Farrell and Ruth Wilson), fought through tough times to raise Travers and her two sisters. Travers was the apple of her father’s eye, sometimes to the chagrin of her mother who wanted him to be more grounded and a better provider. Besides being unable to hold a job as a banker, Travers father was a drunkard – one who couldn’t figure out how to put his family or responsibilities before a pull from a bottle.
As a girl, Travers desperately wanted something to save her father from wasting his life away. Something, or even someone. When she had her chance, she created the character of Mary Poppins to intervene in a fictional situation something like her own.
A film like SAVING MR. BANKS is difficult to asses since it sets out to do several things at once. Like most films of its ilk, it sets out to inspire and entertain. It wants to charm us, dazzle us with its handsomeness, and make us think back on simpler times of our parents telling us stories or taking us to movies. Underneath it all though, I believe that SAVING MR. BANKS is most interested in doing two things more than anything else: The film wants to illustrate the creation of classic family film, and it wants to honour the author whose words inspired the film in the first place.
When the story fixates on what it took to bring MARY POPPINS to the big screen, the film does reasonably well. The myth is that everything that ever came out of Walt Disney Studios was pure magic. The truth is that “pure magic” takes an awful lot of inspiration, calculation, misdirection, and co-operation. Not everything that Disney Studios touched – even in its heyday – turned to gold, and even that that did wasn’t to the liking of everybody involved. Watching Travers suss through every chapter and verse with the creative team is a glorious reminder of what can come from being challenged creatively. However, it is also an intricate illustration of the way one needs to be open during collaboration. Both Travers and Disney are particular about how they see this film coming to light. In some instances they have every right to be…other times though, they are being precious with their ideas.
As a fable of creative endeavours, that seems to be the film’s point: That artists need to be open to other ideas when working with other artists.
Unfortunately, watching the film succeed so well in illustrating that idea makes its failing to illustrate the other idea sting so much more.
During the moments focused on the creation of the film, Travers is treated as a stubborn pill. Seldom compromising, often oblivious, and sometimes rude, her wishes are dragged kicking and screaming through the creative process by DaGradi, The Shermans, and Disney himself. Even when it is revealed that swaths of the story are inspired by her own past, the guys – including and especially Walt – just “don’t get it”. While this is all pretty much truth, and it isn’t entirely fair to pin it on the film, it doesn’t make it right. Watching Walt take Travers aside like a spoiled child and explain to her the greater affect her story has on the lives of those who love it feels insulting. Any artist who creates any successful property is fully aware of their affect on the audience, and Walt would know that. Walt might well have convinced Travers to sign off on the rights with just such a speech, but hearing it spoken again in a fatherly manner fifty years later feels like salt in the wound.
What’s worse, the film never seems to properly interweave the glimpses of Travers’ past. It gets close once, when a speech is overlain with one Travers’ father gave at a county fair. That moment aside though, Travers’ childhood scenes feel melodramatic, slight, and completely unrelated to everything going on in 1961. They do little to illustrate the woman or artist she became, and do little to underline how dearly she wished her own version of Poppins had been around to help him fly right. In both illustration and association they fail Travers as a character, and therefore fail the film.
Thus the difficulty in weighing SAVING MR. BANKS as a whole. It is a movie with a great deal of charm and beauty, and one that does indeed make the viewer think back to simpler times. However, it is a film that needed a deft touch. The legacy it set out to detail is a checkered one, one that never did sit right with Travers right up until her death in the late 1990’s. By painting this portrait of who she was and what she mean to the creation of something so iconic, Disney Studios had before them the chance to atone, and honour a great creative force.
Instead, the failed her. Again.
Matineescore: ★ ★ 1/2 out of ★ ★ ★ ★
I never had any interest in seeing this film, for many of the reasons you just outlined. I also felt that, just from the trailers, it neared propaganda in it’s sickly sweet depiction of the Disney Golden Age. While I am a massive Disney fan, and love Mary Poppins in particular, let us forget Disney’s business practices, Nazi sympathizing, or blatant racism. The reality is that there never will be an honest and judicious portrayal of the complicated world of Walt Disney because the powerhouse company he built is one of the 5 biggest media conglomerates in North America, and they won’t allow that.
Still, that’s a film I’d rather see.
So I’m skipping this one, although I loved reading your thoughts, because I really like to avoid being purposely manipulated, and I’d like to leave my memories of Mary Poppins as unsullied as possible.
It’s interesting because I never got the impression that the details you outlined there were what this film set out to be, but rather it wanted to tell the story of the storyteller…the woman who conjured up a flying nanny to guide a man who’d lost his way.
I never thought that this would be Disney telling the true story of Disney, so I don’t knock it for that…rather that they completely miss the mark on the warm story they were *trying* to tell.
This film is the complete circle of marketing – Disney making a Disney film about the making of a Disney film with Walt Disney as a character. But you know what? I loved the heck out of it. I found it charming, sweet and quite emotional. I thought the weaving of the backstory through the film was great and really gave depth to her pain, why she was so reluctant to let go of her characters. I found some of the stuff with Walt a little sickly, but overall I really enjoyed this.
I get that.
It definitely comes with a warm glow and wants us all to remember who we once were. That’s certainly why even though I wasn’t crazy about it, I didn’t see fit to totally shred it and give it a piss-poor score.
I get everything you’re saying here, I do, and in many ways I agree. I think there is a lot of Disney mythologizing itself (I mean, the way the movie looks, my God) and yet…I’m willing to argue that Thompson’s performance in conjunction with the flashbacks – which worked for me, maybe because it’s Christmas and I’m in a sentimental mood – are purposely resisting that myth. Like, despite what Disney tells Travers, only SHE know what the story is REALLY about, and she’d rather keep it to herself.
Thompson is able to sift through the muck and come up with pearls…doesn’t mean though that her character isn’t condemned to sift through the muck.
That moment when she’s sitting on the lawn and shares a warm connection with Paul Giamatti? I wanted more of that. More of a reason to see this woman as warm and weathered rather than remote and unco-operative.
I think you missed the boat with the idea we were looking back to a simpler time in the flashbacks. Travers was reliving where she had her attention. She could not function in the present because so much of her was in the past.
She was not seeing that past accurately and completely, which is why she wrote Mary Poppins in the first place and then saw it as something to hang on to.
She lived in the same house with the same artifacts and lived the same life day after day. Nothing challenged her memory and beliefs. When she let that life she opened the door. But it had been ready to be opened, probably, for a long time.