Movie review: Saving Mr. Banks - get poppin’

A real story told with a dose of Disney magic.

One could argue that Saving Mr. Banks did not do as well at the box office as expected despite its great acting performances. Based on a true story about the interaction of P. L. Travers and Walt Disney over the production of Mary Poppins, the film touches upon several different aspects of artistic licence, creation, conflict and family.

The story opens to a financially struggling P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) persuaded by her agent to travel from London to Los Angeles to negotiate the rights to her well-known children’s books: Mary Poppins. The enormously popular filmmaker and business magnate, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) has been adamantly pursuing Travers for 20 years to make a Mary Poppins film — because he promised his daughters that he would do so. Highlighting the cultural dissimilarities between England and America at the time, the difficult to please Travers finds herself in a two-week long meeting with Disney and his creative team in a city she is thoroughly disconcerted by.



As Disney musters all his charm and enthusiasm to sell the idea to Travers, she remains inflexible and continues to clash with the team working on developing the script. The film beautifully portrays the importance any work of art holds for its creator and how resistant they can be to external influences. Calling Disney’s films as whimsy and unnecessarily fantastical, Travers continues to stylise Mary Poppins after her rigid personal vision and threatens to drop out of the project at every slightest hint of opposition.

Saving Mr. Banks plays out as a two-fold narrative, with one side of the story revolving around the Travers-Disney conflict; and the other exploring the childhood of the author, depicting her relationship with her loving, but alcoholic father, Travers Goff (Colin Farrell). As Travers’ early years in Australia are further tapped into, we see the impact left on her by the events that took place at that stage of her life. Be it the irresponsible unemployment of her father or the attempted suicide of her mother (Ruth Wilson), it was these events that she used as inspiration to draw up the magical characters in her books. The movie touches heavily upon the concept of a family and the importance it plays as an institution to shape our future.

Saving Mr. Banks is a film about vision persevering against all odds. It is engaging to see both lead characters fight to assert their perspective. After constant creative clashes, the two ultimately manage to reach an understanding as Disney speaks of his own childhood experiences, which also soften up Travers.

Along with a decent acting performance from the entire cast, it comes as no surprise that Tom Hanks has done justice to his role once again. Emma Thompson matched Hanks’ performance while actually superseding it in parts. With fantastic comedic timing, she takes Travers from being a witty but unreasonable impossibility, to a human we can all empathise with. Colin Farrell created exactly the kind of balance between sympathy and loathing that his role called for and left viewers unsure as to how they felt about him till the end of the film.

While generally receiving favourable reviews, Saving Mr. Banks has also been put down as a cheery marketing gimmick. Critics have called it a film about a corporation boasting of its own marvellousness and being more about making the sale than anything else, while the historical accuracy of the relationship between Travers and Disney has also been doubted by others. Having said that, Saving Mr. Banks could still be considered one of the better films of 2013.

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Danyal Adam Khan is an actor, freelance writer and a journalist working at the Peshawar Desk at The Express Tribune. He tweets @DanyalAdamKhan

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 26^th, 2014.