SAVING MR BANKS

Publicity poster for Saving Mr Banks (© John Lee Hancock/Walt Disney Pictures/Ruby Films/Essential Media and Entertainment/BBC Films/Hopscotch Features/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 21 April 2019, I discovered in time that a movie I'd long wanted to see was being shown on TV that afternoon here in the UK, so I made sure to watch it. The movie was Saving Mr Banks, the poignant, bittersweet Disney/BBC-collaboration directed by John Lee Hancock and released in 2013 that recalled the often-fraught, difficult working relationship between Walt Disney and Mary Poppins authoress P.L. Travers during the Disney Studio's production in the early 1960s of what turned out to be one of their most successful and best-loved of all movie musicals, Mary Poppins. This live-action/animation extravaganza of the most marvellous kind starred Julie Andrews as its eponymous practically perfect nanny, a role that deservedly won her an Academy Award as Best Actress.

As a lifelong Disney fan, I had already read a lot about the Disney-Travers conflict. So although certain aspects in this film were fictionalised in order to create more of a story, it is well-documented that Travers (her first name was Pamela), played stupendously by Emma Thompson, was indeed exceedingly fractious, stubborn, intransigent, and often jaw-droppingly rude both to Disney himself and to others involved with the film, including Richard & Robert Sherman, two songwriting brothers who went on to become among the most famous, celebrated composers in the history of film musicals.

Exceptionally, Disney (played here in a very avuncular manner by Tom Hanks) actually gave Travers script-approval rights in order to secure her agreement to selling the Studio the rights to her books for the making of their 1960s musical adaptation. In response, she certainly made the most of it, critiquing everything to an inordinate degree, especially the animated sequences that she particularly loathed.

Nevertheless, Saving Mr Banks ends in a somewhat upbeat manner, at the Disney musical's premiere, during which Travers is visibly moved by the film's portrayal of the children's father, Mr Banks. In real life, conversely, after seeing the film she allegedly insisted to Disney that Dick Van Dyke who played Cockney chimney sweep/pavement artist Bert be replaced and the animated sequences be deleted, only for Disney to point out that her script-approval rights only existed up to the film's completion, not afterwards.

What I never realised until watching Saving Mr Banks is that Mr Banks in Travers's original novels was actually inspired by her own father. In this movie, the Disney/Travers sequences are interspersed with sequences featuring Travers as a child in her native Australia, living with her mother and father, the latter of whom (played engagingly in this film by Colin Farrell) she absolutely adored (even her pen name's surname is actually her father's real first name, Travers), despite his being an incorrigible alcoholic who caused them to descend into poverty and her mother to attempt suicide before he died young of TB. Moreover, Mary Poppins herself turned out to have been based upon a great-aunt who came to stay and help her mother during her father's final decline - changed in the film to an aunt.

Most insightful of all for me, however, was the belated realisation that when Mary Poppins arrived at the Banks' home, it wasn't to save their children from their rebellious, unfocused lives. Instead, it was actually to save Mr Banks himself, from his inability to relate to his children (which had resulted in turn in their rebelliousness), thereby explaining the film's title and paralleling an extremely traumatic time, the slow dying of her father, in Travers's own life.

Altogether, Saving Mr Banks was a very affecting, thought-inducing, memory-stimulating film, one that moved me far more than I'd anticipated, not having previously been aware of Travers's childhood back-story. Certainly, this fine movie was definitely worth missing out on the unseasonably warm weather outside in order to sit inside and watch it.

I have since purchased the official DVD of Saving Mr Banks so that I can rewatch it and re-enjoy it all over again, whenever I choose, as I certainly shall do. Meanwhile, if you'd like a glimpse of what to expect from this magical movie, click here to watch its official trailer on YouTube.

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!