Saving Mr Banks tells two stories, one about the horrors a writer goes through as her book is turned into a movie script, and one about the horrors of growing up with a drunk for a father. Both stories are a bit sad.
I never read any of the Mary Poppins books, but I did like the Disney film. Great music, a fun cast, and arguably the last of the great Disney films.
Since Saving Mr Banks is a Disney movie, Walt is shown to be Saint Disney who has to deal with the ridiculously demanding P.L. Travers who won’t even accept the Scene heading in the screenplay-stuff that no one outside the readers of screenplays will ever see. She makes odd demands like not wanting the color red in the film and she is very firm in her desire that there be no animation used at all.
For the most part, Walt and Co ignore P.L. Travers endless objections and carry on as if she isn’t there.
The secondary story takes place in the depressing Australian town of Allora where a family used to city life in Sydney has to adjust to life with chickens and horses and so on. This bit of the film seems to have confused a few people, who don’t realize that the little girl is the author as a child. My only question would be, who did they think she was? Mary Poppins?
Writers who don’t like what Hollywood does to their work are commonplace, and drunken fathers seem to be all too common as well. Saving Mr Banks was a fairly dull bit of business whose only saving grace was the addition of the brilliant music from Mary Poppins and some possible insights as to why one song or the other was written.
In the end, we never know why P.L. Travers hates animation and we never know why Disney insisted that it absolutely had to be included in the film. We do know that P.L. Travers went on to write more Poppins books and Disney never made any more Poppins movies. Looking at the list of Disney films from this period, Mary Poppins stands out as one of the only films worth watching today. All the rest induces grimaces and shudders just reading the titles.
Saving Mr Banks looked good and it was fun to see all the costumes and cars. And while we did see a lot of drinking, there was no smoking, not even in a night club or from our hero Walt, who would die of complications from lung cancer a mere two years after the story ends.
There were a few laughs, though most were shown in the trailer, and a few tears. The best part by far of Saving Mr Banks was as the credits rolled and they played a bit of the actual recordings of P.L. Travers and the Disney writers. She was so much more of a nitpicker than she was portrayed in the film. This was great stuff.
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