A Walt Disney biopic is something many film fans would kill to see. Saving Mr Banks is the first significant release to feature the legendary studio head as a character but instead of focusing on his life, the film focuses on his battle with P.L. Travers over the film rights to her character Mary Poppins and serves as more of a sugar-coated, deeply sentimental biopic of the British novelist.
Travers was first contacted by Disney in the 1940’s about the rights to her novel and the film begins 20 years later and finds Travers (Emma Thompson) struggling to pay the bills in her London flat. Her lawyer manages to talk her into a trip to California to meet with Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and the team who are developing the film. She agrees to go and see what they’re doing, with the stipulation that she only signs over the rights if she’s completely satisfied.
The film plays mostly as a culture-clash comedy as the prickly Travers tries to wrap her head around the snake-oil charms of Uncle Walt, who greets her hostility with kindness. His gestures of good will often just antagonise the no-nonsense author, like filling her room with stuffed versions of all of Disney’s animated stars and plying her with copious amounts of cakes in the script room, where she does battle with the film’s screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and composers the Sherman brothers (Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak).
Woven into the main narrative are melancholic flashbacks of Travers’ troubled childhood in Australia as her adoring dreamer of a father (Colin Farrell, with an accent so bad it must be a homage to Dick Van Dyke) struggles to hold down work and falls deeper into the well of alcoholism. These scenes are shot in the hazy, sun-scorched hue of childhood reminiscence but are often clunky and clichéd, serving to disrupt the main story thread as much as their intended purpose of highlighting what makes the Mary Poppins characters so important to Travers in the first place.
The main pleasures of the film are the performances, particularly Thompson who hits the right level of haughty disapproval and general distaste at the whole idea of Hollywood, yet she does it with enough humour and humanity to remain likeable and keep the audience onside.
Hanks doesn’t have nearly the same amount of screen time but makes a strong impression, portraying Disney as a warm father-figure with steely business acumen beneath his folksy charm. The supporting cast is strong too, particularly Paul Giamatti’s upbeat chauffeur with personal problems of his own. The scenes with Giamatti and Thompson are crucial to finding the heart beneath Travers’ cold exterior and tug at the heart strings as much as anything in the film.
And it’s the heart that this film squarely aims for, much of it hitting its mark. A lot of the real story of Travers and Disney has been glossed over and the rougher edges of the characters smoothed over. The truth is that even after the film was complete, Travers hated it and swore that Disney would never be allowed near her creation again, even putting it in her last will that no Americans could be involved in the stage show, only English writers. Given that this is film is a Disney production, the whole thing is a lot more warm hearted and good natured than real life, something that would have no doubt irked Travers.
So it might be more Disney propaganda than a hard hitting look at the real Travers and Disney but as a soft-centred biopic with equal focus on laughs and tears, Saving Mr Banks is a huge success. Thompson and Hanks are excellent – sure to be serious players come awards season – and John Lee Hancock is a safe pair of hands behind the camera, delivering a warm and witty entertainment that Uncle Walt would surely approve of.
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