A Hollywood Seduction

Rating: 5/10 (20 December 2014)

I found this as distasteful as You've Got Mail, and for much the same reasons. A powerful man with a veneer of amiability (played in both cases by Tom Hanks) attains the object of his desire by overcoming and taking possession of a female adversary through a questionably sincere appeal to her emotions.
A medieval French nobleman is supposed to have said, "Tell them anything, just get them in bed." That's the story of this movie. Disney desperately wants the rights to Mary Poppins. Travers doesn't want to give up control and risk having her creation vulgarized. Disney tries the whole arsenal of Hollywood charm. The unbendingly British Travers is immune and impervious. Disney finally cracks her after his people find out the back story of her traumatized childhood in Australia. The scene in which he appeals to her sympathy and finally wins her trust by recounting his own childhood misery is a masterwork of fake sincerity. Once her signature is on the Disney contract, she is no longer an object of desire but a problem who must be managed lest she interfere with the marketing of the movie. She is not pleased with the result, but her objections don't matter.
In sum, this is a microcosm account of the contempt with which Hollywood treats the writers of literary property that it wants to adapt to its own purposes, told not from the perspective of the embittered writer but with the smug satisfaction of the victorious studio. It is, in short, the locker room account of a conquest, and all the more distasteful for being well told.