I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little bit of nostalgia. Some critics seem to think Disney is committing a Cardinal Sin by putting out a movie like “Saving Mr. Banks,” as though it were so shamelessly self promoting of their own golden age in order to further their brilliant marketing schemes. But if the story is strong, I typically have no issues. P.L. Travers’ story with Disney is a good one, and “Mary Poppins” most certainly is, so what seems to be the big fuss?
That said, where Disney steps over the line is in turning what is quite simply a movie into something more than precious and whimsical. “Saving Mr. Banks” can be as melodramatic and straining to be profound as it is frivolous.
The story goes that in 1961 P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) was strapped for cash, was fresh out of ideas for writing books and now had no choice but to turn to Walt Disney Studios’ long standing request to adapt Mary Poppins into a movie. She reluctantly accepts a trip to L.A. to review the script, provide notes and then, only then, will she agree to sign over the rights to her book.
She looks at a mess of plush Disney animals littering her hotel room and notices a Winnie the Pooh doll. “Poor A.A. Milne,” she opines, and fears that she, another British author with a beloved children’s character, might meet the same fate. But Walt Disney himself (Tom Hanks) assures Travers that he won’t do anything to tarnish the story and the creation she cherishes as family. After all, he too was once a kid with only a drawing of Mickey Mouse to his name, questioning if he should sell his work.
The bulk of the film is Travers and Disney’s team of music and script writers scrutinizing each detail of the eventual film’s costumes, casting choices and of course songs, allowing B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman and Bradley Whitford to ham their way through Dick Van Dyke’s “’allo Gov’nah!” lines and the signature “Chim Cheer-ee.”
Meanwhile, Thompson has a lot of fun playing the misanthropic sourpuss, a perpetual worry wart criticizing the color red, facial hair on Mr. Banks and contractions in the song “Let’s Fly a Kite.”
It’s toothless fun, and the movie at least makes you understand why she might have some concerns.
But nothing in Travers’ current state of being dictates her character or why the way she feels so strongly about defending her literary vision on screen. It’s all defined by flashbacks to her childhood days in Australia, living in a poor countryside estate with her beloved father (Colin Farrell) and family.
Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) jumps back and forth to this period relentlessly, building Travers as a person only through some occasionally ridiculous melodrama and finding little other way to get to know her.
But “Saving Mr. Banks” is not as cloyingly heart tugging as “The Blind Side,” Hancock’s last Oscar bait outing, and it uses the framework of an established framework in Disney and Mary Poppins that is at least tolerable.
3 stars