Walt Disney Pictures’ new release Saving Mr. Banks is ostensibly the story of how Walt Disney acquired the rights to P.L. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Me, for example. Theme: Salvation. Travers didn’t get along. The interactive nature of the book added to my delight.
(MORE: TIME’s 1964 Review of Disney’s Mary Poppins Movie). I hereby denounce the movie and all its works (except for Hanks). Neither Walt invited her to Mary Poppins' premiere.
Travers. (MORE: Richard Zoglin on the Stage Musical of Mary Poppins). Surrounded by her Disney team Pamela Travers/ Helen Goff sees the whole new redeeming story unfold.
I read the Mary Poppins books and of course never knew the back story. Tommie protects her boss when someone wants to barge into his office while he’s sneaking a cigarette, and keeps steering him toward his best instincts. Walt thought she was a pest. In her first scene, she stares down the camera as if it's a dog who might nip her heels. Tom Hanks is Walt Disney, and Emma Thompson author P.L.
Walt Disney Pictures’ new release Saving Mr. Banks is ostensibly the story of how Walt Disney acquired the rights to P.L. When she clicks into the room in her sensible pumps, screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and bouncy songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. She is escorted to her seat by none other than Mickey Mouse whom she has reluctantly grown fond of. Author P.L. Travers children’s classic Mary Poppins.As such it is an entertaining story of a cranky British author going head to head with the powerful king of animated films before finally signing over the rights to her book. Travers. Yet Hancock, Hanks and Thompson hint at a subtler shade: that Travers, a follower of the spiritualist George Gurdjieff (in the movie she is seen holding one of his books), was virtually mesmerized by the swami Walt.
Refresh and try again. I can hear Walt, from his cryogenic crypt, protesting, “It’s a movie, for Pete’s sake!” And the standard biopic, certainly this one, is, at its best, a simplified form of biography. Hancock applies his Blind Side strategy of Valentine vampirism — he goes for both the heart and the throat — to Banks, assuring from the start that Mrs. T. doesn’t stand a chance. Yes, it is carefully calculated and crafted, but that does not make it any less amazing when they get it right. The flashbacks, which are bathed in Nativity lighting and consume about 40 minutes of the two-hour film, paint Travers Goff (Colin Farrell) as a convivial gent with big dreams who is driven to poverty and early death by his love of liquor. The movie concludes three years later. “I love Mary Poppins.” he dewily tells the author. The collision of the imperious British bisexual and the master manipulator from Kansas City could make for a sour-spirited exposé, like Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. Since the pandemic began, I've found it harder to concentrate on... To see what your friends thought of this book, Saving Mr Banks the Official Multi Touch Book.
Walt was popsicled two years later. Saving Mr. Banks tries to turn a lie about securing a book’s film rights into a parable about St. Walt and the Dragon Lady. Saving Mr. Banks could easily be subtitled Saving P.L. “This world is just an illusion, Ginty, ol' girl. But while Saving Mr. Banks feels like his risen-from-the-grave attempt to pretend that Travers only cried during the film because it reminded her of her daddy, the disgruntled writer got her own eternal revenge on Walt, Burbank and the sunny country that's made Mickey Mouse its international ambassador: Not only did she forbid the studio from making a sequel, in her will, she decreed that no American would ever be allowed to tamper with her Mary Poppins again. And there-in lies the magic.
The critic in me acknowledges that Hanks brings an actor’s art to this anecdote, the gentility of his manner colliding with and enriching the story’s poignancy. We’d love your help. Travers, helpless under the Disney spell.
Thompson is good in a punishing role.
She has held herself captive in a false narrative trying to perfect a world and please a man that long ago passed away, leaving her alone, isolated and disconnected from life. But for a few moments there, I was like the movie’s P.L.