MOVIE: Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks: if you are a Mary Poppins fan (and there must be someone who isn’t), this is a film you should see.  A second reason to see this film is the fabulous performance by Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins.  This film takes place around 1961 and is about Walt Disney obtaining permission to make the movie Mary Poppins.  Tom Hanks plays Walt and, as expected, he is excellent.  Hanks and Thompson play well off each other but this is clearly Thompson’s movie.  There are other excellent performances including Paul Giamatti as Ralph, Travers’ chauffer in Los Angeles, who has some of the best lines.  There is a running joke in the movie as to Disney only using first names and Mrs. Travers, being a formal Londoner, not wanting to be called Pam or Pamela.  The script also has some good lines as to why people may dislike L.A., especially when their presence in the city is prompted by an economic need to sell  their treasured creation, Mary Poppins.  Unfortunately, the movie also spends a lot of time recounting Travers’ childhood in Australia.  I didn’t carry a stopwatch but it felt like a third of the movie was devoted to Travers’ childhood in the Outback.  Once we learn that her father was an alcoholic, we know things will not end well for him or the family.  Knowing that the father worked as a banker and loved his children and that Mrs. Travers was the eldest, we are armed with important facts that explain who Mrs. Travers is and how she ended up creating her characters.  Collin Farrell plays the father and he is quite credible.  However, the movie has too many scenes of the young Travers just staring at her father.  The film’s running time is exactly two hours.  If they had deleted about 10 minutes of the Australian backstory, this would have been a much better movie.  There is an interesting scene where Walt informs Travers of his childhood as an 8 year old delivering newspapers.  It is a long monologue.  After all the Outback scenes, imagining a young Walt in the Missouri snow delivering newspapers would have been an interesting contrast and a visual view would have been more interesting than the monologue.  The movie was directed by John Lee Hancock, who seems to specialize in sentimental movies (The Blind Side).  I don’t know how literally true the story is but the movie validates one sequence as the credits are running.  Mrs. Travers insisted that her interaction with the Poppins screenwriter, Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford), and the Sherman brothers, who wrote the score, be taped.  A segment of the tapes is played as the credits are run after showing us snapshots of the real Travers, Disney, DaGradi, etc.  A nice touch to a nice movie that spent too much time telling us that we are a product of our childhood.