Saving Mr. Banks was practically perfect.

Cafe Society
1

I saw this Saturday morning with my wife and teen daughter. We all really enjoyed it.

Tom Hanks was great as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson was incredible as P.L. Travers. I thought the story they wove was really enjoyable to watch. The entire cast was really good. Special mention to Paul Giamatti doing a masterful job in a smallish role.

The movie tells the story of Disney finally convincing Mrs. Travers to let him make Mary Poppins into a movie after 20 years of trying. It also shows a series of flashbacks giving insight into Mrs. Travers issues and inspiration for some of the story. Colin Farrell does a good job in the flashbacks.

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I haven’t been to the movies in a year, but this is on my list of movies I want to see. Thanks for the recommendation.

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Can you explain the title? Who’s Mr. Banks and why does he need saving?

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Auntie Pam, Mr. Banks is the father in the story “Mary Poppins”. The point of the story is that Mary does not come to help the kids, she actually came to save Mr. Banks from a life that was destroy him and his relationship with his family. That was the storey that Walt felt he needed to tell.

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Mr. Banks is the character of the Father in Mary Poppins (movie, musical and books of course). Why he needs saving is actually what the movie is really about. I’ll spoiler protect the answer. I would advise not reading it if you plan to see the movie as lets face it, I think we all know Walt Disney convinced Mrs. Travers to let him make her book into a movie but why he needs saving can be spoiled.

Mr. Banks was apparently based strongly on her alcoholic but well meaning father who was a bank manager when she was young and growing up in Australia. She has some really strong unresolved issues with this messed up father who she adored. In fact Travers is actually his first name and she chose to go by his name in her professional career. I don’t want to spoil it any more than that.

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Does the movie deal at all with her bisexuality?

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Does the movie sugarcoat what happened in reality? I hear P.L.Travers ended up regretting having given Disney the rights to her stories and hated a lot of stuff about the movie.

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There is also discussion in this thread:

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No, it also wouldn’t really be relevant to the story. The movie only really keys in a few weeks period while she is at Disney working on the script and flashbacks to her childhood when she was around 7 or 8.

Absolutely dealt with this, especially her dislike for Disney animation.

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Just a spoonful.

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I saw it yesterday, and it was the best film I’ve seen this year. Didn’t expect the deep backstory; Colin Farrell was better than I have ever seen him.

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Thanks! I’ve never seen Mary Poppins. Maybe I should.

This makes both movies sound a lot more interesting.

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As mentioned elsewhere, Ian Fleming did not care for the first James Bond movie either. In the end, however, what he told members of the press was roughly “Those who have read the book [Dr No] are likely to be disappointed. But it is a wonderful movie.”

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Wow! :eek:

Mary Poppins is one of the happiest memories of my childhood. When you see it, though, just keep in mind it was made fifty (!!!) years ago.

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Taken entirely as its own thing I found it a very enjoyable movie.

Taken as a telling of a historical event it has lots of issues. I think the movie was very unfair to the real Travers and her protection of her writings (blaming it all on unresolved daddy issues from her childhood is awfully dismissive; especially when many of the specifics were rewritten to make them even worse than they actually had been) and of course there is just a lot of historical rewriting. Perhaps the biggest being that while Disney did greet Travers on her arrival in LA he knew she’d be a pain in the ass so he then left for Palm Springs and left his lieutenants alone to deal with her.

Historical accuracy and fairness is not of primary concern in making a fictional piece of entertainment (and like I said, it is a very good movie ignoring such issues) but since this will become, for most people, the definitive version of the real events it is worth noting.

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It mentions it, but I don’t think it honestly deals with it (because it never really deals with Travers as a person with adult agency instead of just a wounded child in a 60-year-old woman’s body). And I feel, at the end leaves a mistaken impression of how she felt about the final film. Which was that she still really didn’t like it (despite what she occasionally said in public) to the extent that in her will she said nobody involved in the movie could be involved in any further adaptations.

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Well, I found the film easily one of the worst movie-going experiences I had this year, because it stacks the deck so firmly on Disney’s side, and so many sequences have phoney-baloney written all over them that it was hard to take seriously as drama or history.

Also, from a simple story-telling vantage point, it does an atrocious job of handling the endless flashbacks–as if they paid for Colin Farrell and felt they needed to get their money’s worth. One after another after another–rarely illuminating but increasingly oppressive, it slows the movie down interminably.

I felt bad for Travers and felt that Disney’s sense of entitlement about her property was nothing less than artistic bullying–and I like the end product (the 1964 movie) and have no particular allegiance to the books. But they make her so rude, abrasive and distasteful that it’s off-putting. Was she actually like this? Perhaps. But then who cares? I agree with obfusciatrist that the psychological backstory is not only incredibly reductive, but it takes forever for them to introduce the “real life” Poppins to the story–which means lots and lots of scenes of Farrell getting drunk ad nauseum.

The Sherman Bros. were known to have a prickly collaborative process but we never see that. Ditto Disney’s reputation as a taskmaster. Everything in the Magic Kingdom is sunshine and roses, so the whole thing reeks of Mouse House propaganda. And while the collective frustration with Travers is understandable as depicted (including the playing of some genuine archival tapes), it also plays as so one-sided that you can’t help but feel incredulous at everything that happens afterwards–most notably the critical, and highly questionable, turning points in her character.

A shame really because the conversation Disney has with Travers toward the end is skillful & effective (Hanks’s best moment) emotionally, even if it rings 100% false as history.

Is the film well-acted? Sure, particularly Emma Thompson. Anyone with a fondness for the original film will find little snippets of production details to enjoy (particularly, to these ears, the performance of “Feed the Birds”, one of the greatest movie songs ever). But I found the whole enterprise distasteful because it pummels a character acting on principle as being feckless, selfish, and obtuse because somehow her property is “owed” to the world and it’s up to Uncle Walt to heal her (and, by extension, close the deal).

In a word: Blech.

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From the other thread, Terrifel makes a great point:

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I couldn’t agree more with everything that MovieMogul said, including the bizarre way that the flashbacks are handled. It’s almost like they’re PTSD-induced, which, along with Travers’s whole backstory seemingly boiling down to “daddy issues,” gives the icky impression that she was some kind of psychological basket case, even though this hardly appears to have been the case.

Doesn’t that seem like such an odd story choice? Why wasn’t she a pivotal character in the movie? It seems like she barely has any screen time and almost nothing to do in the story. Very strange.

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Especially since (a) she’s played by such a fantastic actress–Rachel Griffiths–and (b) Poppins in the books is such a fascinating creation it would’ve been interesting to see the contrast between her and the Julie Andrews version depicted more in the film itself.