A spoonful of saccharine

Rating: 7/10 (6 December 2013)

This is one of those movies you slightly despise yourself for enjoying. There's not much to it. After a 20-year battle to secure the movie rights to MARY POPPINS, Walt Disney then has another battle to make the movie his way and not the way the author P.L. Travers thinks it should be made.
Walt is played by Tom Hanks, looking as always like Tom Hanks. Pamela (there's a wearisome joke about her insistence on being addressed as 'Mrs Travers') is played by Emma Thompson as an elegant curmudgeon pitched somewhere between NANNY McPHEE and THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. There are frequent flashbacks to her childhood in Australia, a rural idyll wrecked by her father's battle with the booze. Colin Farrell looks a bit uncomfortable in the underwritten role of Dad, handsome and playful, a drunk but never a mean one. Rachel Griffiths is terribly wasted as the stern well-meaning Ozzie Auntie who we are meant infer is the inspiration for la Poppins. Paul Giamatti makes a meal out of the role of Mrs Travers's studio chauffeur, and Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak get some fun out of playing the Sherman brothers, who write the songs which Mrs Travers does not wish to hear or see in the film of her book.
A spoonful of saccharine helps the movie go down. The story's fatal flaw is its predictability, not helped by the fact that most of us have a faint idea of how MARY POPPINS is going to turn out, cartoon sequence and blissfully daft songs and everything. But the tone of this movie is almost as charming as the tone of that movie, and Thompson and Hanks play their roles exactly right, however predictably. So - I'm going to have a go at emulating grinchy Craig from STRICTLY COME DANCING and give SAVING MR. BANKS a grudging 7 out of 10 (Bruno will probably give it a 9)!