Saving Mr. Banks Review

A spoonful of sugar goes down remarkably well in Disney’s interpretation of the Mary Poppins origins tale.

Photo by Francois Duhamel © 2013 - Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Walt Disney’s painful fight for the rights to adapt P.L. Travis’ Mary Poppins has been kept mainly under the table until now. Unbeknownst to cheery moviegoers of the 60s who lapped up the sing along songs and dancing cartoon penguins, pre-production of the widely successful musical was less than chirpy. It’s no secret to those involved that the working relationship between ‘Uncle Walt’ and ‘Pamela’ was less than amiable during the making of the film. Saving Mr. Banks tells the untold story of author Pamela Travers who was fiercely protective of her characters, only succumbing to Disney’s wishes after her finances were bled dry.

After 20 years of playing cat-and-mouse, Travers (wonderfully incarnated by Emma Thompson) begrudgingly agrees to fly to Los Angeles to discuss the film adaptation of her beloved book with Disney (Tom Hanks). Here we witness the steeliness of their rapport to near perfection, particularly in Travers’ fear of selling out and Disney’s sense of desperation to get his film made. Although fairy dust has been sprinkled on history with a certain amount of liberty taking in the suggestion of reconciliation between the author and the popular showman, Saving Mr. Banks plays with just the right amount of depth and levity to please most audiences.

Unyielding in her determination, Travers is very toffee-nosed about everything Hollywood and scoffs at the idea of a musical adaptation. We see through flashbacks her early life in Australia with a feckless but charming father (played by Colin Farrell), the source of inspiration for the Mr Banks character. Piece by piece, biographical details break down her frosty exterior, unveiling a hurt little girl whose childhood was cut short.

Director John Lee Hancock (of the also brazenly fictionalised The Blind Side) is obviously no adversary to sentimentality. The sweetened screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith risks caricaturing one note characters but remains safe in the hands of Hanks and Thompson, who prove to be charming, layered and surprisingly moving. (Even if little details such as Disney’s infamously pushy and demanding demeanor and his resistance to work with women in positions of power are left out.) Unsurprisingly, the writers had trouble reconciling the more obscure aspects of Travers’ personal life for a mainstream audience in original drafts of the script. Her fascination with Eastern religions is merely hinted at; while a troubling relationship with her adopted son and tales of her romantic liaisons are omitted completely. Wisely, Saving Mr. Banks has stripped away the excess and irrelevance, striking a palatable blend of fact and fiction.

Emma Thompson is rightly receiving accolades for her performance having already accumulated several award nominations and being tipped for an Oscar nomination. With a theatrically trained background, she does a formidable job at pushing past her strict haughty persona. Not only is she riotously funny, but inwardly deeply conflicted. Few actresses could pull of what she does, rooting Travers’ comedic complexity and melancholy in a real sense of reality.

In the context of a feel-good family flick, there is little to complain about Saving Mr. Banks. It’s hard not to be charmed by the lovable, smile-inducing, dare-I-say magical sentimentality the story is coated in. Fans of Mary Poppins will lap it up, as did I.

Sam's new release movie reviews

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (125 minutes) PG

There’s something about the mild mannered nature of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that is intriguing. A welcome change from loud and incessantly preachy self-discovery stories, the adaptation of the 1939 James Thurber short story, written by Steve Conrad and directed by and starring Ben Stiller as the titular daydreaming office worker, has a curiously quiet temperament. More than anything, the film feels like a personal triumph for Stiller who directs with a poignant blend of introspection and revelatory reflection that teeters closely towards mysticism without feeling cheesy.

Set in the present day, the film chronicles the decline of Life magazine as a print publication moving to an all-online format.  Photo archivist Walter Mitty is anxious about being fired after he misplaces a negative from the legendary photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) that was intended for the cover of the magazine’s final issue. Meanwhile, his new boss in charge of ‘the transition’, the intrusive Ted Hendricks – played by an obnoxious and opulently bearded Adam Scott - is barely able to feign consideration for the impending unemployed.

Walter’s secret crush and co-worker Cheryl Melhoff aids him in his search for the mysterious missing photograph by encouraging him to go into the unknown. Kristen Wiig gives an understated but delightful performance that suits the movie’s overall pensive mood. Taking him all the way to Greenland and beyond where he undertakes an internal spiritual journey turned external, Walter’s escapades include jumping out of a moving helicopter, skateboarding at top speed down a deserted Icelandic highway and trekking the Himalayas.

Critics may call it quasi-profound or cloying but I found the note of sentimentality the film ends on to be sweet yet subdued.

August: Osage County (130 minutes) MA

There is a hell of a lot of acting going on in August: Osage County. This adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning stage show is a relentless showcase of brash personalities, A-class actors and much gnashing of teeth on part of the audience, all surrounding hellish family conflict.

John Wells’s revision of Tracy Letts’s play transpires a tad unsettlingly onscreen as we look into the personal lives of the strong-willed women of the Weston family, whose paths have re-crossed when a family crisis brings them back to the Oklahoma house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them.

A weighty, acting-heavy first half is levitated by a more interesting second half, identified by a catastrophic series of events and lively domestic confrontations. By the time the characters sink in and start to break caricature to properly feel like a family, you’re left questioning why it took so long. Somewhere along the way, I found an unexpected solace in Julia Roberts’s character, Barbara Weston-Fordham, the unhappy daughter who is horrified to find she is turning into her mother. Roberts is fiercely uncompromising in her brassiness and is comfortably suited to the role of a hardened southerner who takes no prisoners. Meryl on the other hand comes off as a bit overcooked, only rising above parody in rare moments of quiet. Having recently witnessed her staggeringly overrated Oscar winning performance in The Iron Lady (another tale about an ill elderly woman turned psychotic), I wasn’t altogether entranced by Violet Weston.

Broadened acting such as this fits stage like a glove with the sheer amount of energy at play being dispelled to the rafters, but on film, with the overpowering use of close-up, the material is overwhelming. Perhaps the subject matter is too depressing, or the melodrama overheated, but confrontational drama written as well as this needs more delicate handling. From someone who revels in a good dark comedy, this one was a little too humourless for me.