Everything But Disney

Rating: 7/10 (4 March 2015)

"Don't you ever stop dreaming, Ginty, my love." It's a line which seems pretty ordinary, much of cliché nowadays. But the way Mr. Travers Goff spoke it to Helen has captivated me, and cogently pressed me to think of it on personal-terms.
I wasn't aware of Mary Poppins, and of course its author, P. L. Travers; I didn't really live my childhood with Mickey or other popular child's dream per say. Now I am, of course, and I am with utmost respect and affirmation.
Mr. Banks is Helen Goff's recall of her father—practically unstable, lethargic, irresponsible, drunk, but charmingly idealistic, encouraging, and darling—and is surprisingly considered a bad man (Mr. Banks, not Mr. Travers as you might infer) by Walt Disney's co-writer for the movie. Helen disregards this concept with shrinks, screams, tears, and nostalgia. Her attempts don't go awry as she is finally able to convince Mr. Disney to employ her vision, and not the comic and silly alterations that go hand-in-hand with his Mickeys and Poohs.
Saving Mr. Banks, as I was under the idea of, is not about Mr. Disney; it's not even about Mrs. Travers in the least yet most relevant of sense. Saving Mr. Banks is about saving yourself from the ghastly inappropriate transactions that all ordinary men concede; it's about cherishing your past, obsessing over it, but not losing your faith in future, and in alterations where the need arises. Locking yourself into immoral ghosts of a clingy past sure is a good way of retaining your conscience, but it only happens at the cost of your sensibility and rationality. Keep your imagination with you, but infuse them to reality to get a better view of what's really happening.
That was the moral. So what is the movie? Helen sticks on to her past with her most cherished book, Mary Poppins. In childhood, she is in absolute awe of her father who always sticks by her side, promising that he will never leave her, no matter what. He is true, and accompanies his daughter in the form of Mr. Banks later in Helen's life. She recalls her family's shifting to an apparently barren, and countryside land with a wooden mansion that's rotten for ages. It was the ideal place for her father and consequently, for her. Her mother isn't so happy, primarily because Mr. Travers isn't consistent with his practical undertakings, except for the frequent sips of booze. While never disrespecting her mother, Helen is fairly devoted to her father and all his contributions toward her mental acuteness. Following his death, Helen's narrative drags into the future where she finds her father in her dreams, and in reality, making her ambivalence about the book's adaptation more rigid. She doesn't have an issue with Mary Poppins going to Walt, and getting dismantled by his cartoon-ish tendencies; she is only afraid of the loss of identity and interpretation she has for her father, which she so stubbornly clings to. Ultimately, she is convinced when Walt shares his life's secrets with Helen, and claims how his father and childhood have effects on the present-him, and how he respects her character and thoughts like he does for his own. And so the kite flies and curtains close.
Now that was the movie. So what was the movie like? I think Emma Thompson was astoundingly appropriate for the role, and have a strong feeling that no one else could have done it so brilliantly as she has, with the exception of a few, of course, but even they couldn't have looked so surprisingly similar to the actual P. L. Travers (shown with the credits). As for Mr. Disney, Tom Hanks was fine; I mean he did make me feel like I was seeing Walt Disney himself but he wasn't anything extraordinary with the character, which he could have been with a character so special and lauded throughout time and world. The movie was surprisingly boring; I can see a 7.6 on IMDb and now that I have seen the movie, I feel a little dishonored by the rating. It should have been a 7.1 or 7.2 at most, and even that for the nostalgic depictions of Helen Goff, Colin Farrell's drunk-act, Mary Poppins's premiere, and Emma Thompson's exquisite absorption into the role. Otherwise, it was a forced-up movie. Disney's deliberately trying to mock itself with productions like this—when it was empty of ideas and novelty, it pondered upon extracting out its archives, polishing up maker's biography with a good cast, and biased script, and hitting the peddle.
I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but what I did enjoy has been explicitly listed in my review. Apart from that, nah!