Saving Mr. Banks (***1/4)

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.

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viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13

Albert Nobbs (***1/2)

Taking on another identity can be a liberating act, but for Albert (Glenn Close), it’s a self-negating one. Close first played the role, a waiter in a Dublin hotel circa 1900, 30 years ago on the New York stage. In addition to touching on issues of class and gender, the story is about a life constrained, how  the passage of years can render one unrecognizable, and how a chance occurrence can cause lasting change. The rest of the hotel staff regard Albert as a curiosity, or as a fixture. The humble waiter has retreated so far into an assumed identity that she’s almost forgotten herself. Albert simply works and saves, squirreling years of wages away in the hope of buying a small shop. It is only when a strangely sympathetic house painter discovers Albert’s identity that she imagines other possibilities for herself.

I envied the theatergoer who might have stumbled upon the production and been surprised that the character—and the person with the male-sounding name playing him—was a female. Of course, the character would have been much younger. Here, she is supposed to be 40, but looks older; the effect of this is to make Albert’s courtship of the young servant played by Mia Wasikowska faintly ridiculous, but probably also to make Albert more pitiable as one who has wasted so many years. In any case, it is a heart-rending portrayal. The fine screenplay, by Close and novelist John Banville (from a novella by George Moore), gives shape to the lives of the working-class characters. The story depends on two coincidences, but the motivations of the characters are still very much believable.

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viewed 2/12/12 1:05 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed ?–6/3/12

A Dangerous Method (***

It’s probably a cliché to point out that being a good therapist doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to resolving your own conflicts. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly)

Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.

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The Prestige (***1/2)

? Just like The Illusionist, this is set in Europe at the turn of the century (the last one) and tells a tale hinging on what is truth and what is magic. There are two magicians (Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale) in this telling, who become rivals following an unfortunate trick gone wrong. The other prominent roles are Michael Caine as a sort of senior advisor to Jackman’s character, and Scarlett Johansson as an alluring assistant. The movie was directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins).

+ Though perhaps not as elegantly presented as The Illusionist, the story here is probably meatier and delves deeper into the world of what today might tediously be called the magician community. Just as with The Illusionist, magician Ricky Jay was a consultant, and in this case we actually get to see how some of the tricks were done. (Jay also appears as the old-timer who hires both protagonists to work in his act.) Moreover, the characters (Jackman’s in particular) have a trajectory to match the twists of the plot.

- A lot of your assessment of this movie is going to depend on, not so much the ending, but a central premise that sets it up. Without giving too much away, this involves the scientist Nicola Tesla (an effective David Bowie) and the way this real-life scientist’s abilities are fictionally extended to encompass skills well beyond what is possible today, let alone a century ago. It didn’t nearly ruin the movie for me, but it’s a weak point.

= ***1/2 I’m not sure why this merited a wider release than The Illusionist, which has a fairly traditional romance going for it, compared to this movie, whose central themes are jealousy and revenge, and whose major personages are deeply flawed. Maybe just that there are more big names. Anyway, this movie offers a different sort of appeal. Though I’ve repeatedly compared it to the other magic movie, I think The Prestige is a little more like Nolan’s Memento in its tricky plotting, back-and-forth time structure, and character-revealing turns. It’s fairly easy to follow, but it does have a puzzle at the center that the viewer can wonder about.

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The Illusionist (***1/4)

 ? A magician (Edward Norton) becomes the toast of turn-of-the century Vienna but runs afoul of a police detective (Paul Giamatti) doing the bidding of a powerful prince (Rufus Sewell). As always, the trouble is over a woman.

+ The story unfolds as a mystery with the ever-poised Norton and the inscrutable Giamatti worthy rivals. The setup is for a twist at the end. The sepia-toned recreation of Vienna (doubled for by Prague) and the Philip Glass score are atmospheric and lovely. Even though the tricks seem impossible, they are beautiful to watch. Magicians James Freedman and Ricky Jay are credited as consultants, and Norton trained extensively for his role.

- Except for the brief-but-charming flashback scenes that utilize younger actors, the romantic aspects of the movie feel perfunctory. Norton is always a commanding screen presence, but nothing about him speaks of the kind of deep romantic longing his character is supposed to feel. Jessica Biel, his leading lady, is probably better in this regard. The ending comes perhaps too quickly to absorb wholly.

= ***1/4. On the whole, The Illusionist casts a magical spell.

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