BEFORE: I'm watching just one movie while we're in Atlantic City for a 2-day getaway, I think I can make up the difference later on in the week. Colin Farrell carries over again from "Alexander", and this is a late addition to the list, because I had one movie chain that ended with Colin Farrell, and another topic that started with Tom Hanks, and wouldn't you know, along came this one to help bridge the gap.
THE PLOT: Author P.L. Travers reflects on her childhood after reluctantly meeting with Walt Disney, who seeks to adapt her Mary Poppins books for the big screen.
AFTER: Well, this has been a big year for behind-the-scenes films about the processes of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and musicians galore. I'll try to tie them all together in my year-end wrap-up. Now a film that takes a look at Walt Disney, and how he set out to literape (sorry, adapt) classic stories like "Mary Poppins" in order to make more money (sorry, entertain children everywhere). This supports what I've been saying about the man for years, turning Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" into "Disney's The Jungle Book", and Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" into "Disney's Alice in Wonderland", and that's just two examples of a long ongoing pattern.
The advantage Walt Disney had over Kipling, and Carroll, and the Brothers Grimm was that he was alive and those authors, not so much. (Even after Walt himself died, his company carried on the proud tradition by turning stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Victor Hugo and Edgar Rice Burroughs into "Disney's The Little Mermaid", "Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Disney's Tarzan". You just have to know there's a room somewhere where the Disney thinktank wears dark robes and meets around a stone slab as they determine which author's work will next be absorbed into the Disney Borg Collective, right? And "Frozen" is just the latest example.
Walt almost made a fatal mistake with "Mary Poppins", and that was not waiting for the book's author, P.L. Travers, to either die or not renew her copyright. That meant he had to get her to sign a contract giving him the movie rights - and before she did that, she wanted to make sure that Disney would do a faithful adaptation. So she went to Hollywood, suspicious as hell, to meet the screenwriters and composers that were working on the adaptation, and to hold Mr. Disney to his word. She apparently made things very difficult for them and it took a long time for her to approve any of their work. (I think P.L. Travers is my new favorite person.)
And she was 100% right to do so. So what if she thought everyone in Hollywood was a giant jerkweasel? She's entitled to her opinion, especially because... well, first off because they're all giant jerkweasels. She thought that Disney was looking for the next money-making brick in his entertainment empire, and that's exactly what he was doing. Why has Disney Corp. purchased the Muppets, Marvel Comics and Star Wars in more recent years? Because those franchises make money. If you think the company measures its success in the amount of smiles it brings to young children, wake up and smell the stock reports.
And when Travers proves to be a tough nut to crack, what did Disney do? He got a crack team of detectives to research her childhood, and (presumably) a bunch of psycho-analysts to figure out that the Mary Poppins story is really code for how Travers wished her childhood WOULD have turned out, and somehow he gets all this done between the flight she leaves for London on, and the next possible flight out. (I don't know if this was even possible in the early 1960's, before the internet. But let's assume.)
The structure of "Saving Mr. Banks" interweaves scenes of the two weeks Travers spent at the Disney studios with scenes of her childhood in Australia, interacting with her no-nonsense mother and her very creative (but alcoholic) banker father. There are obvious connections to the plotline of "Mary Poppins", since banking is involved in both, and then there are less obvious connections, like who does Mary Poppins represent?
By rights I should have been annoyed by this, because there are so many flashbacks used here, but I'm going to make an exception tonight for two reasons: 1) both storylines seem to progress completely linearly, neither seems to be jumping about at random, and 2) the information learned from the flashbacks has a DIRECT influence on understanding why Travers is the way she is, and why she gradually comes to terms with getting into bed with the House of Mouse.
However, I don't care how tough Walt Disney's childhood was, I refuse to feel any sympathy for him. That's a cold, calculating businessman who lit his cigars with $100 bills, and that's back when C-notes had some actual value. He apparently had his own daddy issues, just as Travers did - but you might as well ask me to feel sorry for Alexander the Great. They both ran conquering empires, after all.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "The Remains of the Day"), Ruth Wilson, Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Bicentennial Man"), B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "Bewitched"), Kathy Baker, Rachel Griffiths (last seen in "The Hard Word"), Annie Rose Buckley.
RATING: 6 out of 10 stuffed animals
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