Sentimental, but fair enough

Rating: 9/10 (6 December 2013)

Walt Disney pursued author Pamela Travers for over 20 years for the screen rights of Mary Poppins, finally luring her to Hollywood to work with his creative people on the screenplay. Truth be told, she didn't want to let go of her characters because they had been her way of dealing with the pain of her troubled childhood in rural Australia.
This interesting and, perhaps, unusual, adaptation of real-life events alternates between showing the difficulties Disney and his people had with the awkward, stubborn, stand-offish and cantankerous Travers, and the events of 40 years earlier in Australia. I have encountered a number of comments where people say that the Australia sequences took them out of the film, and I can understand this: the Disney Studios sequences are played for comedy, whereas the Australian sequences are straightforward drama: sentimental at times, surely, but often quite harshly emotional in showing the way the young Travers idolised her flawed father (and he her) but was powerless - as was everybody else- to rescue him from the alcoholism which destroyed him. However, I felt that these sequences, none of which was overlong and all of which were interspersed throughout the film's running length - were the heart of the story, without which it would not have worked so well.
Tom Hanks' everymannish-ness is ideally suited to the avuncular public personality Walt Disney affected, albeit we also get a look at the hard-nosed businessman who created the Disney empire. Emma Thompson's Travers strains (sometimes successfully) to escape a one-note personality, but this is perhaps a reflection of Travers herself. Colin Farrell has come in for some criticism, but I thought he did well as Travers' father. And Paul Giamatti's chauffeur Ralph is perhaps the most likable (and least realistic) character in the film, but we love him anyway.
This film manipulates our emotions (but hasn't Disney done that right from the start anyway?), but does so in the cause of an unusual but very rewarding story. I enjoyed this rather more than I expected to.