Saving Mr Banks **** (2013, Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell, Paul Giamatti, Ruth Wilson, Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman, B J Novak, Kathy Baker) – Film Review

Double Oscar-winners Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star as Mary Poppins author P.L. (Pamela) Travers and Walt Disney, in this sweet, funny, charming and quite haunting film. Exceptional through the story and production are, the best thing about a fine movie is the stars’ enjoyable, richly entertaining acting. Ideally cast, they’re a class double act, on their finest form.

With roles that are pretty much gifts to any actors, Thompson and Hanks weren’t going to let us down here, were they? Their personal warmth and sense of humour come triumphantly through, but so does their scarcely concealed steely resolve. I told you they are ideally cast. What great movie personalities they both are! Though they don’t really look or sound like their real-life characters, they suggest them brilliantly.

Saving Mr Banks tells the more or less true tale of how Disney plotted to fulfil his promise to his daughters to make a movie of their favourite book. But it turns out it takes 20 years to keep his promise when he comes up against a curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer who has no intention of letting her beloved magical nanny get mauled by the Hollywood machine.

After first making her a failed pitch to obtain the Mary Poppins movie rights in the 1940s, in 1961 he invites her to his film studio in Los Angeles to discuss with him handing over the rights to her beloved book and character. As her books stop selling and money grows short, Travers reluctantly agrees to go to hear his plans for the adaptation, on condition that there’s no animation and she has final approval.

For two weeks, Disney pulls out all the stops. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the talented Sherman brothers, he launches an all-out onslaught on Travers, but the prickly author won’t budge.  He soon begins to watch helplessly as she becomes increasingly immovable and the rights begin to slip further away from his grasp.

She’s staying in great comfort at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Disney cuddly toys as companions. But unfortunately for her (and us), this gives her plenty of alone time to reflect on her difficult childhood. Why didn’t she just go out and have a good time? Well, apparently, she didn’t.

Disney locks her by day in a rehearsal room with the Sherman brothers and the screenwriter Don DaGradi. She aggressively demands all her conversations are taped and promptly doesn’t like anything anyone comes up with. She capriciously demands there’s no red in the film because she’s gone off red. He agrees. He demands that Mary Poppins’s father has a moustache in the film. This time she agrees. He forces her to go on a tour of Disneyland with him to charm her. He’s warm. She’s frosty.

Just when she’s finally warming to the Shermans’ toe-tapping songs, she finds out that Disney plans animation in the film after all. So she tells him she’s betrayed him, to go fly a kite. And she takes the next flight back to London. But, of course, the story doesn’t end there. Walt still won’t give up. He reaches into suppressed memories of his own childhood, which help him to unlock the truth about the ghosts that haunt Travers and to get to her.

It’s something of a magical mystery tale. Mary Poppins’s troubled father Mr Banks turns out to be based on Travers’s own dad (Robert Goff), played by Colin Farrell in an endless series of scenic but rather dull flashbacks to Travers’ childhood in the Aussie Outback.

That’s another surprise. Though she sports hoity-toity, imperious, upper-class English manners, Travers is a fake. She’s a common Aussie. And with crucial dad issues. He promised he’d never leave her, but he did, of consumption. He was a hard drinking bank manager, troubled by financial issues, pushing her mom, Margaret (Ruth Wilson, Hanks’s wife) to the brink of suicide. So he, of course, is revealed as the basis of the grouchy Mr Banks character, played in the film of Mary Poppins by David Tomlinson.

It turns out Walt has father issues too. His dad made him go on a newspaper round early each morning in the freezing cold and gave him the buckle end of his belt when needed. But both characters still love and are haunted by their dads.

Anyway, Travers finally signs away the movie rights, and there’s another betrayal. Walt doesn’t invite her to the premiere of the finished movie – but she goes anyway. An she meets up again with her limo driver, Ralph, the only American she’s liked on her two-week stay in LA.

Paul Giamatti is excellent as Ralph, low key, bemused and calling Travers ‘Mrs’ in a wry and witty turn. Jason Schwartzman is outstanding as the exasperated Richard Sherman and Bradley Whitford is notable as writer DaGradi. These are three fine supporting performances.

Though it starts a bit slowly and shakily, the film’s only weak point, acting and film-wise are the Aussie bits, with Farrell rather miscast and slightly struggling and Wilson not making much of an impression either. Nor does Rachel Griffiths as Aunt Ellie, the brisk, do-gooding prototype for Mary Poppins, nor Annie Buckley as young P L Travers. It’s not their fault. It’s the writing. The flashbacks are too long and not interesting enough per se.

Otherwise, Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith turn in a polished, involving, entertaining screenplay. John Lee Hancock directs smoothly and discreetly, with all his focus on the actors. The period atmosphere is good. It looks about right, but isn’t overdone.

I imagine the film takes plenty of liberties with the know facts in the cause of artistic licence. I’d like to know the actual true story. But, hey, this isn’t a documentary; it’s only a movie, Pamela. A very good one too.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Movie Review

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