Speranza
An Unbeliever in Disney World
‘Saving Mr. Banks,’ With Tom Hanks and Emma
Thompson
“Saving Mr. Banks,” released by Disney, is a movie
about the making of a Disney movie (“Mary Poppins”), in which Walt Disney
himself (played by Tom Hanks) is a major character.
It includes a visit to
Disneyland and, if you look closely, a teaser for its companion theme park in
Florida (as yet unbuilt, when the story takes place).
A large Mickey Mouse plush
toy appears from time to time to provide an extra touch of humour and warmth.
But
it would be unfair to dismiss this picture, directed by J. L. Hancock from a
script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, as an exercise in corporate
self-promotion.
It’s more of a mission statement.
It also revisits a proud moment in the company’s
history.
The making of “Mary Poppins,” at the time (the early ’60s) the most
expensive live-action film Disney had produced, and eventually one of the most
lucrative and beloved.
More precisely, “Saving Mr. Banks” recounts the
consummation, in business and creative terms, of Walt Disney’s long courtship of Helen Lyndon Goff
, the creator of Mary Poppins, played with spirited fussiness by
Emma Thompson.
Fans of the book and the earlier movie will know that Banks
is the father of the children cared for by Mary Poppins, but even those entirely
innocent of her previous literary and cinematic incarnations — if such people
exist — will find this movie accessible and enjoyable.
That is part of the
Disney brand, of course: fun for everyone, with a spoonful of therapeutic
medicine to help the sugar seem nutritious.
The best parts of “Saving Mr. Banks”
offer an embellished, tidied-up but nonetheless reasonably authentic glimpse of
the Disney entertainment machine at work.
Mrs. Travers, as she insists on
being called, is a starchy, grouchy Londoner whose books have stopped selling.
At the urging of her agent, she submits to the ordeal of a first-class flight to
Los Angeles, a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and daily limousine service to
Burbank, where she is plied with cookies, snack cakes, Jell-O squares and, when
she insists on it, tea.
None of this Southern California hospitality — or
the friendliness of her driver (an unusually sunny Paul Giamatti) — melts Mrs.
Travers’s determination to protect her creation from Disney’s whimsy.
“I won’t
have her turned into one of your silly cartoons,” she declares.
Walt, aware that
he does not yet have the rights to “Mary Poppins,” grants her script approval.
She proceeds to torment the screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and the
songwriting team of Richard and Robert Sherman (Jason Schwartzman and B. J.
Novak) with objections about everything from casting to costumes to the grammar
of the screenplay.
The audience, meanwhile, is treated to stripped-down,
in-progress versions of songs from “Mary Poppins,” notably the infectious “Let’s
Go And Fly a Kite.”
But this is not just the tale of how the happy artisans of
Hollywood and their boss soften the heart of an uptight Englishwoman.
It is that, of course.
Ms. Thompson has no peer
when it comes to British stiffness, and Mr. Hanks is a master of evocative
facial hair, American regional accents and earnest likability.
His Missouri
twang, mellowed by the California sun, is as friendly and reassuring as the real
Walt Disney’s used to be every Sunday night when he introduced his television
broadcast.
Usually preceded by an off-screen cough — a premonition of the lung
cancer that would kill him a couple of years after the “Mary Poppins” premiere —
Walt is less a mogul than a kind and reliable daddy.
He dotes on his
intellectual properties (the mouse, the park, the picture) as if they were his
children.
He wants to adapt Mrs. Travers’s novel to keep a promise to his
daughters.
As it turns out — as we discover long before Walt does — the
author’s own daddy issues are at the heart of her reluctance to play nice in the
Disney creative sandbox.
“Saving Mr. Banks” toggles between 1961 Burbank and a
dusty village in Australia more than half a century before, when the future P.
L. Travers was a little girl named Helen Goff (Annie Rose Buckley), nicknamed
Ginty by her beloved father (Colin Farrell).
An impish, imaginative fellow, he
is also a hopeless alcoholic, barely able to hold onto his job managing a bank,
and causing his poor wife (Ruth Wilson) no end of worry.
Hancock (“The Blind Side”) integrates the two plots — the charming backstage
comedy and the Down Under family melodrama — as smoothly as he can.
As is often
the case in movies structured this way, though, the elements distort rather than
illuminate each other.
The tale of Ginty and her dad is thick with dubious
sentiment and leavened with glimmers of sensitive wisdom, but the light it casts
on the grown-up Mrs. Travers is harshly literal.
The film asks us to believe
that she is at once an astute storyteller and an emotional automaton entirely
lacking in psychological insight.
It also indulges in the common biographical
fallacy of grounding adult creativity in childhood misery.
A Spoonful of Sugar for a
Sourpuss
Walt and Mrs. Travers have that in common, and
Walt, in a late, decisive conversation, explains that their job as storytellers
is to “restore order” to the chaos of life and infuse bleak realities with
bright, happy colours.
Imagination, in other words, is a form of repression.
Joy
is a kind of denial.
Mary Poppins may have had a different idea.
She is, on the
page, committed to solving problems rather than wishing them away.
But the
Disney version has proved more powerful, more seductive and, it almost goes
without saying, more profitable.
“Saving Mr. Banks” is rated PG-13 (Parents
strongly cautioned). Briefly glimpsed smoking, and scenes of death and illness.
Saving Mr. Banks
Directed by John Lee Hancock; written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith;
director of photography, John Schwartzman; edited by Mark Livolsi; music by
Thomas Newman; production design by Michael Corenblith; costumes by Daniel
Orlandi; produced by Alison Owen, Ian Collie and Philip Steuer; released by Walt
Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Running time: 2 hours.
WITH: Emma Thompson
(P. L. Travers), Tom Hanks (Walt Disney), Paul Giamatti (Ralph), Jason
Schwartzman (Richard Sherman), Bradley Whitford (Don DaGradi), Annie Rose
Buckley (Ginty), Ruth Wilson (Margaret Goff), B. J. Novak (Robert Sherman),
Rachel Griffiths (Aunt Ellie), Kathy Baker (Tommie), Colin Farrell (Travers
Goff) and Melanie Paxson (Dolly).
Wow! How do you make a movie about a Disney film that doesn't include all
those, ahem, "product placements" you mentioned? (and did you really
have to "look closely" to see that huge map of Florida?).
Yes, in the words of
Woody Allen, "no matter how cynical you are you can't keep up," but Scott is
certainly on the cutting edge of cynicism here.
I know it's an anathema for a
critic to be viewed as being "taken" by a movie, but if there ever was a film to
just sit back, relax and enjoy it's Saving Mr. Banks.
On another note (no pun
intended), the songs of Robert and Richard Sherman for Mary Poppins have
inexplicably never been held in the same regard as those of other great American
musicals (Oklahoma, West Side Story, etc.) as they deserve, perhaps owing to
some dusty snobbiness of hearing them for the first time in film rather than
live on stage.
Hopefully Saving Mr. Banks will "restore order" where this is
concerned.
I haven't seen the movie but I read the script.
I laughed in some places and
cried in some places and I very much enjoyed it.
It is a psychological piece on
Travers.
I also read a review of the book the movie was based on.
Travers views
on the movie were complicated.
After all she had script approval so one can't
say that it was totally different from what she expected.
She got royalties on the
gross of the movie which was a pretty good deal someone worked out for her.
"Thank you for your Rating" says the NYTimes, but I realize that checking
one circle can't actually convey a correct mental/emotional/physical response to
this holiday offering.
In future, I beg the Movie Review section to offer
perhaps 5 more circles to the left of Poor. How about -1 = Gagging. -2 = fixed
stare, -3 = early on-set dementia, -4 = cerebral aneurysm, -5 = spontaneous
destruction of pre-frontal cortex.
We watched the screener and if it's the
same irritating dreck being shown on hundreds of screens beginning this Friday,
I can only advise: save yourselves.
Wait until it's on DVD which should be in
mid-January so you can take frequent bathroom and gin breaks.
FROM AN ONLINE REVIEW:
You know how
you can watch something and think it's really not very good, poorly written
perhaps, or the characters aren't persuasive, or the direction seems loose, but
it does have moments of clarity, of style, of creative intent, and, with a few
little fixes, it could be really OK?
Please know this: "Saving Mr. Banks" is
not that movie.
It is stupid, and I mean that in the purest sense of the word.
Puerile. Inane. And as an homage to Mr. Disney, it is Dopey.
The characters have
the depth of a Richard Petty cardboard stand-alone in a liquor store.
If only
they were as silent.
Between Ms. Thompson's nasal gnatterings and Mr. Disney's
forced bonhomie one has no recourse but to dive for the exit.
If you feel you
really want to give your money over to see this monstrosity I can only suggest
you take an aisle seat near the back. You will leave sooner than you can
imagine.
---
To any of the flinty comments above I
would reply (and ask).
What do you make of the taped evidence produced at the
end of the film?
Did anybody stay for the credits?
That reveals the underlying
reality.
This film includes some hard scenes, quite realistic, such as Travers
Goff dying of influenza. So let's not think that there's no dark side to this
picture (it's displayed in digital form, if nobody noticed), however fanciful
certain scenes might be. I had not expected to be moved--but I was.
The
film "Mary Poppins" I find a little cloying now (as a child I found it a great
film musical). And it won Julie Andrews a well deserved Oscar after Jack Warner
rejected her for the quite sincere but miscast Audrey Hepburn.
So let's
hear from the cynics above how they view the death on screen of a child's
father, and how that might affect a young child. This picture has a lot to say
about how authors cathartically turn their own hard experience of life into
tales that children love to read. Actually, that makes for pretty good cinema.
Who chooses to echo "Saving Private Ryan" for any other film, but
especially something with such a lightweight subject matter. Was there some
underlying, earlier property with that title?
As this review ends on
a sly note hinting at the real lowdown on LOTS more questionable Disney lore:
read "The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney" by
Richard Schickel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disney_Version.
At
least this movie isn't a musical.
Perhaps someone can take the story to Broadway
as a musical comedy.
After that, Disney Co. can re-adapt that show for the
silver screen.
..the Disney version always wins! The true story is just as
fascinating but this is a Disney film. So enjoy it as a film, not truth.
Agree about the accent. Mr Hanks is somewhere in the southwest with a
strange lilt to his voice, rather than mid west.
It's a shame also he couldn't
have trained the timber of his voice. I can still hear Mr Disney's distinctive
voice on his weekly Disneyland show, which none of us kids ever missed in the
'60's. His presence was not broad. While Tom Hanks is a wonderful actor, but he
misses the characterization of Walt Disney and is far too contemporary for the
role.
This is a
well-meaning movie, and Emma Thompson's character is meant to be a stiff-backed
Brit.
But no Brit was ever this stiff-backed without being a complete
sociopathic, narcissistic, miserable human being at the same time.
I had to stop
watching.
No amount of paternal alcoholism justifies being such an abrasive,
dismissive egotist.
It wasn't just with the Disney folk, whose treatment of her
creation she feared would cheapen it; she was a miserable, insufferable person
with everyone she encountered. I completely lost interest.
Haven't seen this;
don't intend to.
It looks unfortunately very like the awful "Hitchcock," with
its facile pseudo-psychology, its klunky re-enactments, and its inappropriate
star-driven casting.
Such projects would be negligible, except that I fear that
they have the effect of depriving us of what could be challenging, insightful
portraits of the creative process.
It's ironic that portrayals of artists who
have often touched a nerve of truth in their work are so frequently marred by
these sorts of simplifying, saccharine misrepresentations.
Uncle Walt was hardly
around the studio when "Mary Poppins" was being made and never took P. L.
Travers to Disneyland.
Thank God for the film to improve on reality which is a
big reason we love movies!
There is a deep flaw in the movie's script. The struggle between Travers and
Disney is repeatedly interrupted by long flashbacks to her childhood in
Australia. Just as the story gets some momentum, it veers back to yet another
scene of her alcoholic father. We need to be told once, but the screenwriters
repeat this over and over again.
And the numerous flashbacks are clumsily
inserted. It's no "Citizen Kane." The film's Australia is obviously
California.
The Tom Hanks version of Walt Disney never convinces for a
minute. It's just Tom Hanks in a wig with a strange accent that doesn't come
near Walt's. They got the tie right. (Smoke Tree Ranch, for you Disney
geeks.)
The true story of Walt's long haul to make "Mary Poppins" is
fascinating. It was told much better in The New Yorker several years ago. Find
that version.
This movie is like rubbing
salt into a wound.
It is no secret that Travers despised the way Disney
"Disneyfied" her story and absolutely forbid the Disney team that created the
movie from ever being involved in any other Mary Poppins related endeavor.
Instead of just letting old dogs lie, the Old Dog just has to lie and not only
saccharanize the original story, but then sugarcoat the story of putting the
original story to screen. What I would really like to see is a documentary on
how both movies were made (i.e, the shear breadth of shameless corporate
self-propoganda).
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
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