Saving Mr. Banks

Being both a Disney film and a Tom Hanks film, you know there are not going to be any negative revelations about the iconic Walt Disney. The period is when Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) was trying to convince the author of the Mary Poppins books to allow him rights to make a movie about the character. He's promised things like no animation, and since we know now that there WAS animation, we wonder how he got away with it.

P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) has been fending Disney off for a couple decades but for some reason this time has allowed herself to be coerced to a face-to-face meeting with him in L.A., most probably because her royalties for the books have faded and she needs money to keep up her home and lifestyle.

She is very protective of the characters in the book and you see why in some flashbacks. As a child in Australia, she was very close to her father (Colin Farrell) who, while he was a loving husband and father, was not a very responsible wage-earner, and he fell to drinking heavily which was his downfall. He was the one who stoked her imagination, although in the adult Mrs. Travers you see little evidence of any joy or whimsy. Although she insists on final approval, the film is pretty much written and planned to Disney's specifications and he believes it is more a matter of convincing her, rather than her idea that she will review the script, change it, then sign on the dotted line. Throughout Mrs. Travers' prickly meetings with Disney and his creative team, you come to see that the characters in the book are based on her family, which she never states openly. In bits and pieces, the guys win her over, although I don't know if they were astute enough to realize her personal connection to the characters (although Disney finally does).


I have never seen the Mary Poppins movie so the title meant nothing to me (Mr. Banks is the father character in the movie, which Travers based on her own father), and I didn't know its importance to Travers. Emma Thompson does a good job although the character comes off as a movie staple--the curmudgeon whose heart is softened. Paul Giamatti plays a personal driver assigned to take her to the studio daily, and whom forms a bond with her with his constantly cheerful attitude despite some problems of his home. I think Mrs. Travers sees in him something similar to her own father in the way he worries over his own child. Bradley Whitford,  B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman play the creative/music team and although they get some screentime--playing the songs, acting out the musical numbers for her--and you can see how their talent is important to the Mary Poppins movie, this is a story about the Travers character and the three guys are mostly there for laughs in the movie and largely underused. The character played by B.J. Novak I believe was a consultant for this new movie.

Tom Hanks is not bad as Disney and he seems like the right sort of actor to play him, although there is nothing too revealing in the portrayal and I don't know if the plot or personality differences truly happened in this way. Melanie Paxson and Kathy Baker play Disney company secretaries, and Rachel Griffiths is Travers' aunt who comes to help when her father is ill.