- “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”
Director: John Lee Hancock
Staring: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks
Emma Thompson is a great actress. We already knew that though. Beyond her breathing life into P.L. Travers, the propaganda film Saving Mr. Banks does not have much else going for it.
Saving Mr. Banks follows Walt Disney’s attempt to secure the rights to P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins. The movie relies on the fact that you know this, and that you are familiar with Mary Poppins as a character. It takes twenty minutes or so into the movie that the word “Mary Poppins” is even uttered. The film follows P.L. Travers interactions with Walt Disney in 1961 while flashing back to her growing up in Australia in 1906 with her good-spirited but alcoholic father played by Colin Ferrell.
Modern day Travers is insufferable and frustrating. All the Disney employees including Tom Hank’s as Walt Disney and B.J. Novak, Bradley Whitford and Jason Schwartzman as writers are cheerful and full of life. The whole 1961 plot is about a bunch of hard-working people at the bright and chim-chim-cheery Disney Corporation being frustrated at a frustrating woman. In the end, as we know because Mary Poppins, is a movie that clearly exist, Walt Disney wins and gets the rights.
Mr. Banks is the father in Mary Poppins and the whole movie is centred on daddy issues and flashbacks that it may as well be a rejected episode of Lost. The flawless Walt Disney presented in the movie is trying to produce the movie because he promised his children that he would. In a movie about fathers presenting a controversial figure as the greatest father there is really shows the bias the biopic has against its subject. This is a movie about Disney winning so that 52 years later they can produce a two-hour long Mary Poppins ad and call it Saving Mr. Banks.
The production values of the movie are strong. You can fully believe the eras the movie is representing are accurate while the Disney characters are not. This would have been a much stronger movie if there was some real conflict presented between Walt Disney and Travers. The flashbacks mean much less when it seems like Travers is the only person in the film with any sort of background or conflict (Paul Giamotti’s limo driver character has problems too but he’s cheery like Disney so it’s fine).
There is a great story in Walt Disney trying to secure the rights to Mary Poppins but of course Disney would not want to present itself in a negative image. This is probably why no one should commission their own biopics.
Bear Pursuit 