I just saw the movie Saving Mr. Banks and I’d like to recommend it to you.
It stars Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks and tells the story of how Walt Disney acquired the film rights to the book about Mary Poppins and then produced the movie.
The production of the movie was actually a very small detail. The real point of the movie was the damage that the book’s author (P.L. Travers played by Emma Thompson) had suffered for most of her life and how that compared to a similar kind of damage that Walt Disney had suffered and how the two of them came together and helped each other be happy and repair much of that damage.
It was very uplifting and I would guess that most anyone will find this movie to be a real joy to behold. I am usually a pretty grouchy person (kind of a sourpuss) and watching this movie put a big smile on my face and I walked around for most of the day after watching it with this big smile on my face.
There are some really superb performances in this film. A large part of the movie are flashbacks to Emma Thompson’s life as she was growing up in Australia.
Do you recall the actor B.J. Novak? He played a character in The Office and also played a character in Inglorious Basterds. There was also Bradley Whitford who played a part in The West Wing and Paul Giamatti who played a limo driver who became friends with Thompson. I kind of expected the two of them to fall in love and get married at the end of the film.
I was kind of stunned by Tom Hanks’ performance as Walt Disney. It took me a few minutes before I actually recognized that it was Tom Hanks who was playing Disney. There has been quite a lot of controversey recently about some of his work. There was the movie Captain Phillips. I read a few reviews of that movie and it seemed to me that about half the people who saw it hated his work in that film whereas the other half really loved it. I didn’t see that movie. But I really loved his work in this film.
I believe that if you have two and a half hours available, you will very much enjoy spending that time watching this film and I hope it will make you as happy as it made me.