Curiouser and curiouser

Saving Mr. Banks: It's not so easy as some may think to get a handle on this Disney film about Disney. Not if you approach this material as an outsider. The ostensible subject is Mr. Disney's ultimately successful struggle to get permission from the cantankerous author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, to make a movie musical out of her popular children's books. Begin with the fact that one has never seen the movie or read the books. Then consider that the two main characters are (clearly, on the face of it) arch caricatures that at the same time are adorable whitewashes, figures destined to be called "beloved," as will the book and the Mary Poppins movie. Add the fact that Emma Thomson, who plays P. L. Travers here, is somehow easier than you might think to confuse with Julie Andrews, who played Mary Poppins in that 1964 movie.

Fortunately, to save us from confusion, Julie Andrews is not an actual character in Saving Mr. Banks, nor is she ever mentioned.

Finally, take in the fact that perhaps the best performance isn't Emma Thompson's, as the writer, or Tom Hanks's, as the slightly puffy, lightly-mustachioned Walt Disney. It might be the job done by Colin Farrell, playing the young father seen through the haze of a gorgeous, yet sad, series of flashbacks, set in Australia, of P.L. Travers' early life. It's not clear where these flashbacks come from, or if they are true. They have a lush Hallmark-card beauty that could not be true. This man Farrell plays is a contradiction. He surely embodies the way Travers wants to think of her father, Travers Goff. He is a dreamer, a failure, and a short-lived drunk, and yet he's beautiful, and a lovely father. Is that combination possible, outside the realm of Disney movies? The only reason Goff doesn't get fired from his job at a regional Australian bank in a place called Allora is that his boss knows he has a young daughter, Ginty (Annie Rose Buckley). Gingy seems like one of Lewis Carroll's young girl "friends," surrounded by sunlight and flowers.

The setup is this: P.L. Travers, who lives in a townhouse in London, has resisted Walt Disney's appeals for the rights to make a movie adaptation of her book for twenty years. But now her agent warns her sales are faltering. She goes to talk to Disney in Hollywood to save her house. But she is very fussy, and objects to everything, especially the idea of putting music in a movie of her book or including any animation, yet she gives in. We get the theme of the stuck up old maid who melts. It's predictable. Eventually Travers (Thompson) sings along with the songs in the studio -- and even dances -- and cries at the premiere (at a lovingly recreated Grauman's Chinese Theater: period details of 1964 are nice).

We never see the movie being made. We only see Disney and his secretary and Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman), who set the story to music. And there's the only person in America Travers likes, her Disney-provided chauffeur, Paul Giamatti, known only as Ralph. She doesn't like him either, at first, but she warms to him eventually, doubtless because he's the single person who really only wants to serve her.

As with so many conventional movies about transformation, you ultimately must take the process esentially on faith. Saving Mr. Banks firmly establishes how grumpy and negative Emma Thompson's character is, but exactly how she morphs into a person who smiles and sings along, allows songs and animation, is never shown. It just happens. This is a reconstruction of something that is essentially left somewhat hollow and blank, as shooting the Mary Poppins movie, and Dick Van Dyke, and Julie Andrews, are not to be seen. It's assumed you know Mary Poppins, perhaps by heart.

What is on screen, besides the romantic dream of the Australian flashbacks (how did Travers come to seem, or pose as, English? that's left out), is what happens in Disney's offices when the young men perform their songs (Schwartzman, hair smashed down, at the upright piano, is very good). And always there's the relationship, cajoling and combative, between Walt and Mrs. Travers, and the eventually warmer one between her and Ralph, who always turns up when he's needed. She kindly offers Ralph some reassurance for his disabled daughter, unseen, in a wheelchair, showing grumpy Mrs. Travers can be upbeat and motivational. But isn't her book that?

The plot of Mary Poppins is left vague in Saving Mr. Banks, so its relation to the flashbacks is a mystery, left for those who know already know to see. But IMDb Comment writer griffolyon12 probably gets it at least partly right when he or she says this film isn't about the making of Disney's Mary Poppins but "storytelling as both truth and escape, as well as a film about fathers."

You never learn what "saving Mr. Banks" means.

Over the closing credits you hear some excerpts of the actual tape recordings P.L. Travers demanded to be made during all the movie conferences. And you wonder, when you listen to them. It's tantalizing, because this is the real thing. Was P.L. Travers combative and cranky, or, as she sounds in the tape, just very particular and specific? But if she turned out to have been merely a commonsensical tea-drinker with very particular ideas, you wouldn't have Emma Thompson's prickly but ultimately lovable British eccentric. You would not have this movie.

But what is this movie, other than the assumptions you bring to it? And if you don't bring any, this movie seems very curious at times. And of course, not a three-dimensional picture of Walt Disney -- but that's a whole other story. Saving Mr. Banks, in any case, is certainly not recommended for anyone who's not a big fan of the Mary Poppins books, the 1964 movie, and the productions of the Disney studios.

Saving Mr. Banks, 125 mins., debuted at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2013. It's commercial release was 29 Nov. in the UK and 13 Dec. in the USA.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.