SAVING MR. BANKS -- Helen Lyndon Goff

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.
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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).