SAVING Mr. BANKS

Saving Mr. Banks . . . the story of Lady Grump and Mr. Charm – a Technicolor film dealing with black and white characters.

Perhaps this is no surprise since the first image on the screen is ‘Walt Disney Presents”.  What follows?  A middle age woman (Emma Thompson) slowly comes out of a Zen-like meditation with a stern scowl.  We get it.  She can’t get over the anger that must be buried deep within.  Poor thing.  

We hope for relief as she takes a meeting with her solicitor – we’re in London, 1961 – but no, she is spitting nails.  That sugarcoated daddy who creates silly American cartoons has been courting her for over 20 years to give him the rights to her beloved 1934 novel, Mary Poppins.  Never, I mean NEVAH!  Definitely Lady Grump.

We are left breathless in anticipation of the dog and catfight that this feisty dame will surely be having with the legendary Walt Disney.

You can only imagine my disappointment when Walt (Tom Hanks) turns out to be kind and patient and charming throughout this entire 2-hour film.  Barely a scowl.  OK, he’ll be Mr. Charm. 

So, the plot has been announced -- goodness vs. badness.  Sure enough, author P. L. Travers, upon arriving in Hollywood, provocatively ratchets up her objections ad nauseam concerning her fear that Mr. Disney will sugarcoat her Mary, introduce animation and, worst of all, characters who sing and dance!  Good old Walt just keeps smiling and nodding patiently.  Really? 

But Neal Gabler writes in his Disney biography of 2005 about a man who inspires all those around him but can become “ . . . cantankerous, abusive, mean spirited, even vicious.” Well, let’s not go into THAT – remember, he and his corporation represent a billion dollar brand of goodness. 

Enough about Walt.  Instead, director John Lee Hancock and his writers treat us to revealing flashbacks of Travers, her childhood in Australia and her playful and ever doting father (Colin Farrell).  The underbelly of her idyllic childhood is that her beloved and story-telling hero is an alcoholic who drinks himself to an early death in 1906.  Seven-year-old Pamela (P. L.) is understandably traumatized.

His loss is so deeply etched in her broken heart that P.L. has unwittingly created a hardened shell around herself in order to never surrender again to such enchanting intoxication.

Enter Walt Disney, the world-celebrated intoxicator of enchantment.  The psychological nightmare that haunts Travers makes sense if you absorb the flashbacks carefully and thus understand the illogical logic of  P. L. Travers’ lifetime of anger now projected onto Disney. 

But no, at the very end of the film, Walt just shares with Travers his own difficult childhood and suggests that they both free their respective Mr. Banks (real and fictional fathers) and resolve to let them fly up and away, like a kite (song cue).  Yeah, just like that.  Unfortunately this filmic denouement comes off as simple-minded fluff.

Is it possible that a movie might have been made about a man and a woman, different in every way, who turned their respective painful childhood traumas into creative fantasies which managed, years later, to enchant the entire world?

I wonder.  Would the powers who control a modern entertainment empire sanction a story about their founder which reveals, according to author Neal Gabler, “ . . . how a painful 1941 labor strike destroyed the collegial atmosphere at Disney’s studio; how this experience embittered Disney and galvanized his fierce anti-communist politics”?  Would the film be allowed to shed light on Disney’s role as one of the first to speak to the House Un-American Activities Committee about suspected industry communists and lead him to become a leading player in creating the Hollywood Black List?  Then there is Gabler’s quote about Disney’s “ . . . affiliation with an executive organization famously hostile to Jews.” 

What about the ever-complaining P.L. Travers?  Although she never married, she adopted a son at age 40, separating him from his less appealing twin as advised by her astrologer.  Her self-centered choice caused both men to grow into sadly dysfunctional adults.  In a revealing 2005 Valerie Lawson biography of Travers it is noted that P.L. managed to have some robust romantic relationships with both male and female partners.  Now that’s interesting.

In short, reducing the film’s two central characters to represent Anger and Charm is a missed opportunity.  Both are fascinatingly complex and quite authentically human.  But the filmmakers dare not suggest this.  Instead we are given both as cartoon characters with little depth. 

A grownup film is yet to be made weaving the struggle between two immensely talented people as they attempt to translate Mary Poppins into a film that resonates truth yet remains genuinely entertaining.  Creatively, a spoonful of sugar can still make the medicine go down, don’t you think?