It's certainly no classic

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2014)

It's not a piece of schlock either but it's a fair to middling story about culture clash and more importantly about the magical abilities of Walt Disney. Let's face it, writers are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, or anywhere else for that matter.... just visit your local library if you need confirmation. Disney knew that, but he also knew that once in a while one of them comes along with a special talent or idea that only exists in that particular person. You could try to plagiarize it but the end product would be missing the spark. The story is not really about the making of Mary Poppins, it is a story about the exceptional interpersonal skills, patience and persistence of Walt Disney. This film shows that the man didn't build one of the most celebrated companies in the world because he was lucky or because he was a ruthless businessman, he got there because he also had a gift of looking inside people and finding out what made them happy.
And so we see how he used these qualities to handle even the most difficult individual and get what he wanted too.
Tom Hanks is really very good as Walt himself, Emma is pretty good in her role even though she doesn't have to step too much out of what we see in her real life persona (To be fair I'm sure she's a wonderful person outside of the glitz). Paul G is excellent as the driver, but then again he is excellent in any part he plays.
The nebulous scenes from Australia were a little too shallow for my liking, although I did enjoy the part where they move to the new town. I enjoyed it for totally selfish reasons,as my own parents emigrated to Australia with me as a babe-in-arms in 1948, so it was nice to see a reconstructed scene similar to what they would have seen back then.(No wonder we turned right around and went back to England!) The characters in these flashbacks didn't add a lot to the plot and really could have been played by anybody.
All in all it's a movie that you would have rented from the video store (if they still existed) when the one you really wanted had been snapped up.