Approved To Be Watched By The Whole Family

Rating: 10/10 (10 November 2015)

I know this movie came up a while ago, but tell you the truth I did not manage to watch it on the big screen - shame on me! One fine night this week I was in a mood for a musical or a fun movie and I remember how I wanted to watch Saving Mr. Banks. It was not quite a musical, but it was about a musical, and it was not quite a comedy, although it was somewhat fun 50% of the time and 50% serious. P.L. Travers Saving Mr. Banks tells the story of how the magical musical Mary Poppins came to life. It is a biographic movie about the writer that created Mary Poppins and her fight/struggle with Walt Disney in order to do the right thing by the story. P.L.Travers was a stubborn and serious writer and she wanted Mary Poppins to be "never, ever just Mary". For children worldwide Mary Poppins was just a fairytale, a lovely story, for her it was a real person, from real life, flesh and bones, transcripted to page so she would remember her and not only... Mary Poppins was a story about her, her sister, her parents... and to be more precise, about her father. For her the story she created was not only about the nanny, but about the hardships of life, of the adult life that one day each child will have to face!
Mary Poppins did not came to save the children, but rather her father... Mary Poppins is actually her very own aunt, put on paper. The movie switches between scenes of here and now and the scenes of P.L.Travers when she was just a little girl. Her father is played brilliantly by Colin Farrell and her mother by the very delicate and lady-like Ruth Wilson ( that I just adore in Jane Eyre ). We can see her growing up in Australia and being forced to move from the beautiful house in the city to a small house in the middle of nowhere. Somehow her father manages to keep her dreaming for a better world, but her mother sees and faces the real troubles of the family - raising 3 kids and taking care of the house and a husband who is drinking and not able to maintain his job at the bank... Great attention on details like the outfits, to fit the characters and the period of time P.L.Travers loved her father that much that she wanted to preserve his memory somehow... and what better way to do that than writing a book about it? She wanted Mary Poppins as a serious movie, yet a children movie. She wanted no animations, no musical made out of it. Somehow it went half-way: neither what Walt wanted nor her. It took them 20 years of beating around the bush to get her on a plane to USA in order to get the movie going - by that time, unlike in this movie, Walt had already purchased the rights to do Mary Poppins. Unlike the movie, she never danced on the music they created for the movie, but she did particularly liked the song "Feed the birds".