The name Disney conjures up beloved images for children everywhere, and for many of their parents. Yet the terms Disneyfication and Disneyization)
are generally pejoratives, used, as Wikipedia puts it, to “describe
the processes of stripping a real place or event of its
original character and repackaging it in a sanitized format. References
to anything negative are removed, and the facts are watered down with
the intent of making the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.” This
usage post-dates the death of Walt Disney himself, and so would not
have been used by P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson). But surely the words
describe what she feared would be done to her Mary Poppins novels, which
Disney (Tom Hanks) was keen to adapt into a musical.
As
played by Thompson, Travers is the embodiment of the term “no-nonsense,”
or possibly rude. In an early scene, Travers tells her London solicitor
that she does not like being treated like a “neonate,” and Thompson is
among the actresses who can most credibly utter such a phrase. However,
the solicitor points out that her royalty checks may not be enough to
maintain her comfortable home, and so, against instinct, she agrees to
work with Disney, who had pursued the rights to her work for two
decades. So anxious is he to make the movie that she is allowed script
approval, providing her with a gigantic bargaining chip. In a boon to
her future biographer, she insists on recording her sessions with
screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman).
Battles
over matters great (would the film be a musical?) and small (would the
titular Mr. Banks character have a mustache?) provide the drama, and
some comedy. For the pathos, interspersed with the 1961 Hollywood
sequences are several sequences set in 1906–1907 Australia, with Colin
Farrell as the doting father of the future author. Left out is virtually
everything in between. I’m not crazy about facile links between adult
behavior and indelible childhood circumstances. The script seems to
imply that adult Mrs. Travers can’t abide the sight of pears simply
because she associates them with an unpleasant memory over 50 years earlier, which seems false to me, but to its credit it’s usually less heavy-handed.
Still, the most entertaining sequences are the ones that pit the proper
Mrs. Travers (a running thread is the her annoyance at being called
“Pamela”) against Disney, the writers, her gregarious driver (Paul
Giamatti), and the occasional airline employee.
It’s
perhaps ironic that what Travers feared would happen to her greatest
character would happen to her as well. In reality, though indeed a
spinster, she was a woman of many enthusiasms beyond tea, the only one
she appears to admit to in this film. What art owes to history is
another debate, and knowing that Travers adopted a twin (refusing to
take his brother), a fact obliquely referenced in the film, does not
alter its quality one way or the other. However, a film about a
curmudgeon who finally succumbs to the charms of a cartoon mouse is a
different film than one about a complicated woman who so rues her
Hollywood experience that she never allows a sequel. Saving Mr. Banks is the first kind of film, but makes enough nods to being the second type that it does not seem sickly sweet. To paraphrase a song made famous by the film, it merely provides a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
IMDb link
viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13
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