: Saving Mr. Banks
Wow. I thought this looked good but it turned out to be amazing. So good.
It’s the story of how Walt Disney convinced Mrs. P. L. Travers, the author of the classic Mary Poppins books, to sell him the movie rights. She was extremely possessive of the characters and felt that Disney would turn them into an animated monstrosity. A great deal of the film is her being picky with the Disney writing staff.
But the most interesting part of the film are the flashbacks to her childhood in Australia. There she grew up with a creative and wonderfully imaginative father who clearly inspired her to become a writer. (He’s played by Colin Ferrell who is shockingly good in the role.)
Sadly, we later get to see this wonderful man had a terrible dark side, and that’s really the core of the film: how children cope with the complex world of adults where a person can be both good and bad at the same time.
The film leaps between the two stories, and it’s mesmerizing. Some of Mrs. Travers’ demands and fussiness seem over-the-top, but I love that if you stay through the credits there’s actual audio recording from one of her sessions with the writers and it sounds just like the character in the film. (It’s a testament to the power of this film that despite its two-hour length, not a single person in the theatre I was in left until the credits finished.)
The ending is heart-breaking and heart-warming. I adored the father-daughter relationship portrayed in the flashbacks — it’s just incredible stuff, sweet and tragic and priceless. You’ll definitely want a tissue. But it’s not a sad movie — it’s a movie about hope and victory and overcoming our past.
Everyone in the film is excellent, and there are quite a few famous actors in small roles. Tom Hands as Walt is perfection, and Emma Thompson just nails Mrs. Travers. (I find it ironic that she starred in the Nanny McPhee movies playing a Mary Poppins-like character.)
Everything about the film is well-done — it hits every note just right. One thing that was annoying to me during the film was that it’s been so long since I’ve seen Mary Poppins that I wished I’d re-watched it before seeing this movie, but then at the end of this film when Mrs. Travers go to the premiere they show so many clips from the original movie that it explains everything and reminds me of how good a film Mary Poppins is (probably in large part due to Mrs. Travers’ crazy demands that the film be done just right). I’d really bene hoping they’d show her reaction to the film and they do and it’s not a token shot or two but an extensive scene — it’s a very satisfying ending.
As a writer myself, I was initially intrigued by this story about a writer and her creation — but this film gets so much deeper into why we write and how what haunts us as children infects everything we do as adults. It’s just an amazing film and one of my top picks for 2013. Go see it!
Topic: [/movie] |
