Saving Mr. Banks 2013

[4.6/10] I like to imagine that the pitch for Saving Mr. Banks was a cynical, mercenary attempt to finally win Walt Disney Studios an Academy Award for Best Picture. “Let’s cram as many former Oscar nominees as we can into this thing,” I picture one cigar-chomping, mustachioed movie producer saying to another. “They like period pieces? Well this is two period pieces in one!” the other might retort. “Plus!” a third would chime in, “It’s a movie about making movies and the power of film. Academy voters eat that crap up!”

That is, perhaps, a grim and pessimistic view of the Tinseltown titans at the House of Mouse. But the lesser alternative is that creative people greenlit this, wrote this, filmed this, and made this, earnest believing that it was good. The contrary possibility, whatever its cynicism, seems kinder and more preferable.

The film endeavors to tell the story of the creative collaboration between Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers and deified studio founder Walt Disney amid the books’ adaptation for the silver screen. It also strains to be a Shakespeare in Love-style accounting of where the ideas and characters and touchstones that found their way onto the page and eventually into the movie theater, began as experiences for the creatives who captured them. And somewhere in there, it means to be a stark melodrama about a small family’s struggles in Rustic Australia.

That these disparate aims never fully coalesce into a complete whole is the least of Saving Mr. Banks’s problem. Instead, the movie suffers from none of these elements being particularly good.

The Hollywood sausage-making hagiography is full of the usual clichés, tepid monologues, and legally-mandated creative breakthroughs which just so happen to coincide with personal ones. The literary anthropology of where the ideas for Mary Poppins’s bag or the Banks patriarch’s job or “sick old Uncle Albert” came from is both dull and too cute by half. And the exploration of Travers’s Aussie childhood is a paint-by-numbers dose of mawkish cinematic malware.

The movie ostensibly comes down to a simple conflict. Walt and his team want to make a bright, spritely picture full of music and merriment and imaginative wonder. Travers is averse to Disney’s brand of adaptation by sparklification because her books are a reflection of her childhood and family, which were more serious and important than all that. So much of the film is a tug-of-war in that regard. Travers poo poos some fanciful flourish or altered detail before flashing back to a scene from her youth that explains why it’s important to her. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The cinch of the movie is that despite Travers’ proper British prickliness and Walt’s folksy, heart-of-a-child warmth, the two are not so different. Despite the major issue of the film centering on whether Travers will sell the Mary Poppins film rights to Walt, a conflict initially framed as one of art vs. commerce, the movie bends over backwards to show that Walt gets it.

He compares Travers’s dilemma to his own struggles over whether or not to sell Mickey when he was a penniless animator. He recognizes the inspirational qualities of her writing, which is what spurs him to want to realize it in celluloid. Most of all, he understands what it’s like to have to reconcile memories of your father as a child with a more complicated understanding of them as a full human being as an adult.

True to its title, the change of heart at the core of Saving Mr. Banks owes to the power of storytelling and moviemaking to not only preserve those we love, but to imagine better endings for them than the unforgiving bounds of reality would allow. It’s a paean to the healing aura of stories and to the ability of these fictions to let us process our histories with those close to us, to understand them, and to recast them in their best light. Mary Poppins, on the page and on the screen, allows Travers (or at least her Emma Thompson-based personification), to grant her own complicated father the ability to live beyond the real world he so loathed. The movie, with its heart-moved paternal figure, becomes his tribute.

That’s a great and complex idea for a movie to grapple with. Unfortunately, this one weighs it down with a heap of didactic monologues, standard prestige picture pap, and maudlin interludes until it’s practically lifeless. For having so many decorated actors, for looking so colorful and gorgeous on a scene-to-scene basis, and for tackling such worthy ideas, Saving Mr. Banks is all that more shameful for turning out like a pile of sap and pablum.

What’s worse is that it’s unbearably tedious. The film runs for two hours, and you’ll feel every minute of it. There’s no point it can’t overemphasize with yet another over explanatory flashback. There’s no story beat it can’t hammer home to the audience with the most on-the-nose parallels between past and present or Walt and Travers. There’s no notion it can’t shake off any subtly from with a hand-holding, tic-filled speech. Overlong, overblown, and overstuffed, the movie loses the noble thought it intends to express amid all its gussied-up, penny candy offerings.

The irony is that the real Travers didn’t have a change of heart about the 1964 movie and only begrudgingly accepted it as a good film (albeit a bad adaptation) later in life. It seems Saving Mr. Banks takes its own lesson to heart -- that movies can rewrite the past and add in the happy ending real life is often too cruel or miserly or complicated to give us -- and decides that it can apply even in stories about tacking on happy endings to other movies.

But for however much the original Mary Poppins was a secret tribute to Travers’s father, Saving Mr. Banks is only a tribute to modern moviemaking’s inability to channel that same level of sentiment or magic, even when trying to borrow it right from the source. My fervent hope is that the movie was a soulless attempt to win Oscar gold, if only because its attempts to fete the souls of Travers, Disney, and the fathers who shaped them, feels so hollow that you hope it was intentional, rather than an accidental failure and disservice to the legacies of each.

Utterly brilliant!

I haven't watched 'Mary Poppins' itself in many, many years but still have memories of it as a kid. That meant I had the desired knowledge of the key parts about that film, which I'd say is probably wise to watch before this - though not a requirement, at least in my opinion.

Ironically, Travers' complaints about the animation segments to the 1964 film are justified on my end - I've been on a Disney marathon since May, but to "shorten" the watch load I decided to only watch the studio's productions that are straight up animation or straight up live-action, so MP missed the cut given it's a combo. If she had her way, I'd have watched it again relatively recently. Damn you, Mr. Disney!

Anyway, 'Saving Mr. Banks' is an outstanding film! One that's filled with so much heart and some rich storytelling - loved the back and forth between Travers' early and later years. They entwin the two films together very well, while the Disney stuff - while in your face - adds humour as well as meaning.

Then you have Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Two actors I adore already. Hanks plays Walt Disney very good, he's top notch in this. However, it is Thompson that steals the show. She's superb as Travers, who isn't the most likeable character but Thompson ensures you stay invested in her. She's great in 'Treasure Planet' and 'Nanny McPhee', but this is the best I've seen from her so far.

Elsewhere, shoutouts to Colin Farrell, Ruth Wilson and Paul Giamatti for what they bring - especially Farrell. Jason Schwartzman and B. J. Novak are good as the Sherman Brothers, also.

A charming and very nicely made film. Can't recommend it more.

Disney's live-action wing takes a look at the difficult, complicated working conditions that led to the creation of the studio's 1964 classic, Mary Poppins. Emma Thompson succeeds memorably as P.L. Travers, the complex, seemingly-joyless British authoritarian behind the source novel, while Tom Hanks is, surprisingly, only okay as Walt Disney himself. The tough, contested relationship between these two, opposite sides of the same coin, forms the core of the story; Disney pushes to make the film uplifting and creative, while Travers fights to maintain her characters' dignity.

On the surface, it's a good example of how the powers of dedication and creativity can overcome difficult circumstances to make a brilliant piece of work - perhaps one that's even better than they'd have made amidst calmer waters. I felt that the scenes inside Disney's idea factory, superficial as they proved to be, were the film's best. Writers, songsters and artists giving it their all, only to be shot down by a stubborn client on a technicality and come back for more - that's the intriguing stuff. The frequent dalliances into flashback and character moments, though effective in a classical sense, felt too formulaic and artificially sweetened for my taste.

A fine enough ride, though I was hoping for something slightly more off-the-beaten-path.