Saving Mr. Banks is the so-called “true” story of how the great and powerful Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) finally brought P.L. Travers’s (Emma Thompson) beloved children’s book, Mary Poppins, to the silver screen. What follows is the weaving of pre-production between Mrs. Travers, as she prefers to be called, and Disney’s team of songwriters, the Sherman Brothers (played by BJ Novak and Jason Schwartzman), along with scenes from her childhood in Australia with a super fun but destructive and drunk father (Colin Farrell), which are used to explain why Mary Poppins is so near and dear to her heart.
What cinema does that real life cannot is whitewash history and make everything tie together in a sweet little package. Saving Mr. Banks does this in spades, and it IS a nice package, but….it tries so desperately hard to put all the puzzle pieces together for you and then does a pirouette and shoves some jazz hands in your face that you can’t help but feel ever-so-slightly turned off by the whole thing.
The story is a decent one: a curmudgeonly author demands authority over the screenplay of her beloved book and learns to let go a little once overcome by the spectacle of Disney. We all know how it ends because we grew up with the wonderful Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, but Saving Mr. Banks fails to capture any magic of the musical I grew up with, save for one scene when the Sherman brothers play “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” for Travers, who finally warms up to it. Even my heart grew three sizes.
Thompson is fantastic as always. Prickly, contentious, British, and stern. I love a grumpy character more than a sunshiney one, and she does the trick. She only softens really in the presence of Paul Giamatti, who is her hired driver and says weird, schlocky things like “The sun came out to say hello to you!” and gives her a sob story to make her heart thaw a little. It’s a cinema trick that works for many people, but for me it feels forced, and that made me feel a little sad.
I wanted to like Saving Mr. Banks more. I love Emma Thompson. I adore Tom Hanks, and I loooooooove Mary Poppins. Hanks and Thompson do their best here, and they are both their usual talented selves, but even they can’t overcome the heaping spoonfuls of high fructose corn sugar that is dumped down our throats.
Go just to see Emma Thompson shine, but know that you’ll leave wanting to just read Mary Poppins (or see the movie that Travers hated so much) instead.
-- Darcie Duttweiler
What cinema does that real life cannot is whitewash history and make everything tie together in a sweet little package. Saving Mr. Banks does this in spades, and it IS a nice package, but….it tries so desperately hard to put all the puzzle pieces together for you and then does a pirouette and shoves some jazz hands in your face that you can’t help but feel ever-so-slightly turned off by the whole thing.
The story is a decent one: a curmudgeonly author demands authority over the screenplay of her beloved book and learns to let go a little once overcome by the spectacle of Disney. We all know how it ends because we grew up with the wonderful Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, but Saving Mr. Banks fails to capture any magic of the musical I grew up with, save for one scene when the Sherman brothers play “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” for Travers, who finally warms up to it. Even my heart grew three sizes.
Thompson is fantastic as always. Prickly, contentious, British, and stern. I love a grumpy character more than a sunshiney one, and she does the trick. She only softens really in the presence of Paul Giamatti, who is her hired driver and says weird, schlocky things like “The sun came out to say hello to you!” and gives her a sob story to make her heart thaw a little. It’s a cinema trick that works for many people, but for me it feels forced, and that made me feel a little sad.
I wanted to like Saving Mr. Banks more. I love Emma Thompson. I adore Tom Hanks, and I loooooooove Mary Poppins. Hanks and Thompson do their best here, and they are both their usual talented selves, but even they can’t overcome the heaping spoonfuls of high fructose corn sugar that is dumped down our throats.
Go just to see Emma Thompson shine, but know that you’ll leave wanting to just read Mary Poppins (or see the movie that Travers hated so much) instead.
-- Darcie Duttweiler
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