Directed by:
John Lee HancockCinematography:
John SchwartzmanComposer:
Thomas NewmanCast:
Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Colin Farrell, Annie Rose Buckley, Ruth Wilson, Paul Giamatti, Jason Schwartzman, B.J. Novak, Kathy Baker, Ronan Vibert, Mia Serafino (more)VOD (4)
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Two-time Academy Award®–winner Emma Thompson and fellow double Oscar®-winner Tom Hanks topline Disney's "Saving Mr. Banks," inspired by the extraordinary, untold backstory of how Disney's classic "Mary Poppins" made it to the screen. When Walt Disney's daughters begged him to make a movie of their favorite book, P.L. Travers' "Mary Poppins," he made them a promise—one that he didn't realize would take 20 years to keep. In his quest to obtain the rights, Walt comes up against a curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer who has absolutely no intention of letting her beloved magical nanny get mauled by the Hollywood machine. But, as the books stop selling and money grows short, Travers reluctantly agrees to go to Los Angeles to hear Disney's plans for the adaptation. For those two short weeks in 1961, Walt Disney pulls out all the stops. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the talented Sherman brothers, Walt launches an all-out onslaught on P.L. Travers, but the prickly author doesn't budge. He soon begins to watch helplessly as Travers becomes increasingly immovable and the rights begin to move further away from his grasp. It is only when he reaches into his own childhood that Walt discovers the truth about the ghosts that haunt her, and together they set Mary Poppins free to ultimately make one of the most endearing films in cinematic history. (Walt Disney US)
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Who will emerge victorious from the central duel is obvious from the fact that this film was produced by Disney, which used the subject matter for the tacky promotion of its own values and products. All narrative nuances and character attributes are subordinated to the self-glorifying tone of the film. Any information that didn’t fit into the pre-defined boxes for Walt Disney (the ever-smiling, pragmatic-to-the-bone All American man) or P.L. Travers (the strait-laced admirer of Victorian morality) was simply omitted. We thus do not learn from the film that Travers was an unorthodox bisexual devoted to Zen Buddhism and, of course, there is no mention of Disney’s chauvinism and antisemitism. ___ The desperate author’s attempt to sabotage the American premiere of what Disney turned her book into is presented as a humorous episode that not only couldn’t jeopardise the success of the film, which went on to win five Oscars, but also led to the author’s hardly believable awakening. Hancock’s variation on romantic comedies (in which sex is logically absent) gives cynical viewers no other option than to interpret the woman’s tears in the climax as an expression of helplessness over her lost battle with the media conglomerate. I find it particularly perverse when an outwardly heartwarming film for the whole family unashamedly assert that it’s fine for a powerful studio to defile someone’s creative vision for the sake of higher revenues. After all, the result was a film that is still beloved today, so why be angry? ___ Regardless of the unfair distribution of power that, contrary to society’s current mood, leads us to root for the wealthy capitalist, Saving Mr. Banks is not a film that would go awry in any way. The attempt to liven up the interior drama with flashbacks leads to the haphazard use of these jumps in time (memories are not “triggered” by events in the present) as well as to their excessive sentimentality and visual kitsch (which, unlike War Horse, is not a self-conscious reminder of how Technicolor melodramas looked). The search for parallels between real characters (Travers’s parents) and fictional characters (the book’s protagonists) is as forced and would-be revelatory as in the biographical Hitchcock and the whole storyline from the past, which comes across as needless and only slows down the narrative. ___ Emma Thompson’s performance is more stilted than her character requires and Hanks plays such an idealised and instantly lovable version of Disney that you expect animated flowers to start dancing and singing around him. The hollowness of the directing and the acting in the film, which – unlike the film Mary Poppins – can only talk about the power of imagination, culminates in one of the last scenes, in which we are alerted to the author’s miraculous character transformation by the fact that the woman is wearing a dress of warmer colours and sitting in a room flooded with light. The clouds part, the sun comes out after the rain and we can leave the cinema with the feeling that everything is just as Mr. Disney would have wished. 50%
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The beginning stretches so much it made the corner of my left eye twitch, as it experienced microsleep at regular intervals. From the very beginning, the film intertwined the past with the present, and it didn’t work well together. Gradually, however, I grew to like both storylines. And finally, I even grew to like Emma Thompson, portraying the writer Travers who created Mary Poppins – a story that Walt Disney filmed into the movie with perhaps the most positive vibe that he and his studio ever created. Gradually, I grew fond of everybody, including Colin Farrell, who is probably punished by always playing the alcoholic, and I really enjoyed this strange but well-done biopic. And the best, of course, was Tom Hanks, who played Walt Disney in this movie in the way the studio shooting the film – that is, the Walt Disney studio – definitely deserved.
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Critiquing a film from Walt Disney Studios for being too polished and playing it safe seems completely foolish to me. I'm responding to a review I read (do people really get paid for these insightful sentences?). It's like saying the Japanese have slanted eyes. Yes, the studio is going its own way, but you simply get what you expect. A kind story that praises Walt Disney, whatever he was actually like, a story that adores Disney as a brand. So what? This is exactly what this film should do, it succeeds at it, and surprisingly, it's even more than bearable in its length. Moreover, Tom Hanks is simply excellent, although it's true that Emma Thompson notably outshines him. They complement each other perfectly, I received a dose of emotions that are surprisingly not presented too melodramatically, and I wouldn't mind watching this film again. This is exactly what you expect from Disney. A beautiful illusion that even though everything around you is horrible, at least for those two hours, things can be better.
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Such a safe bet that it doesn't have a single surprising or completely sincere moment. There have already been so many biographies of rude people that the perpetually sour Miss Travers is more of a nuisance. Both the storyline with the adaptation and the journey into the past follow a fabricated template, which becomes murderously tiresome over the course of two hours. The innocent third star is saved by the perfect Tom Hanks and the fact that the whole mess is written with such a friendly and amicable tone that it actually has nothing to provoke. Perhaps only by that unexpected and sadly grand ordinariness.
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