A spoonful of diabetic sugar

Rating: 5/10 (27 March 2014)

'Saving Mr. Banks' is just another dose of Disney goofiness meant to spread the Disney feel again as their entire film catalog has done. I don't know if I expected something different walking into this film. I was hoping that 'Saving Mr. Banks' would be a drama that dealt with real characters. Instead though I find a cartoon starring a Walt Disney and a PL Travers who are more akin to Mickey than they were to their real life counterparts.
I am drawn to the character of PL Travers in a lot of ways here because I feel for her. Not in the sense the movie probably intended me to do. There are a great many flashbacks(which really hurt the pace and dramatic timing of the film) to Travers' childhood in Australia. Colin Farrell plays Travers' father who has a happy face hiding alcoholism. Every easy dramatic choice is made in dealing with Travers' past and the effect it had on her. Alcoholism and the effect it has on families is so much more than the "I did something wrong" guilt trip that is portrayed in the film. And so this piece of the film is pretty predictable and melodramatic.
Travers however is not a wasted character despite the laziness in developing the portrayal of her emotional scars. I love her as an artist, Emma Thompson makes some safe choices with the defense mechanism Travers shows but they definitely come from an inspired place. Mary Poppins is her creation and she wants to fight for it. It's a really simple motivation but it's powerful. We want to see her stand up to Disney because we know that great works of literature lose their meaning through the commercialism film medium. The central conflict over Mary Poppins is inspired. The problem of course is that Disney not only wins it. He wins it in an ethically unsound way. Disney gets everything he wants and Mary Poppins becomes his own.
Of course the big draw to the film for me and so many other film goers was that Disney himself was being recreated for the screen. Walt Disney was a fascinating man. He had an almost split personality. Walt presented himself as a happy surrogate father to children everywhere who tuned in to see him. That was certainly a vital part in dissecting the whole but so are the other aspects. Walt Disney was in many ways an unsavory character. I didn't expect Disney to allow their namesake to be portrayed in an overly negative light because some stories are nothing more than extremities. 'Saving Mr. Banks' however canonizes Disney. It canonizes Disney to the point where we can almost see past the Hollywood magic and see what really happened here. Disney is a con man to Pl Travers. He promises her artistic credibility but in the end he turns Mary Poppins into something of his own. Which is fine. It's been done plenty of times before but in the dramatization of this we are supposed to root for Disney. There is a moment in the film where Disney accuses Travers of thinking he is nothing more than a 'Midas' looking for gold bricks to his kingdom. That is of course exactly what Disney was. Mary Poppins was a notch on his belt.
My biggest problem with the film and why I think it is ultimately a failed exercise is the ending. PL Travers hated the decisions Disney made throughout the entire thing. At the end while not explicitly said we are lead to believe that Travers loved the film. This goes against the actual history of what happened and is nothing more than revisionism to polish Disney's halo. The Disney myth is a powerful one but intelligent viewers can see past it. This is just the same goofy Disney sentimentality we've been subjected to and it's even more offensive in that we are telling the story of real people. Disney may smoke and swear in this but he's still the bright eyed Uncle Walt who can do no wrong. Walt gets his Mary Poppins, why do we have to love him for messing with someone's integrity too?
Uncle Walt adds another brick to his castle