"Sorry Daddy"

Rating: 8/10 (25 November 2014)

"I dropped the pears ... sorry daddy" says the stunned child who will grow up to become the creator of Mary Poppins. The child (wonderfully underplayed by Annie Rose Buckley) has returned from the pear fetching errand to find that her long-suffering father has passed away from influenza during her brief absence. Thus begins a life of atonement for P.L. Travers, who will take her father's first name as her surname and adopt a rather strait-laced no-nonsense existence. The whimsical person she was to have become is instead incorporated into her creation, a character modeled on the physical characteristics of her Aunt Ellie (played by Rachel Griffiths) and the style of J. M. Barrie - who she admired. The film confirms this in the closing credits with two different drawings of Mary Poppins, the first one appears when Buckley is credited and the second one a little later when Griffiths is credited.
Buckley's is the key performance of the production as she must non-verbally sell the child's absolute and unqualified adoration of her father, if the parallel story of Travers' efforts at atonement for not saving him are to ring true. In this the young Australian actress is absolutely convincing and John Lee Hancock demonstrates his considerable acting-for-the-camera directing skills.
The film is an extremely well-crafted tale with two parallel time-lines, Travers' traumatic coming-of-age story and Walt Disney's ultimately successful efforts to secure the rights to bring Mary Poppins to the big screen. Both proceed chronologically, with Travers recalling her childhood in sequenced flashbacks. More subtle is a third story, minimalist references to Disney's own childhood, which serve as a compare and contrast with Travers; with portions of both fathers blending into the 1964 film's version of Mr. Banks (played by David Tomlinson who appears at the center of that film's cast photo in the closing credits) . The film teasingly alludes to a similarity between these two creative people. Both brought a lot of childhood baggage with them into adulthood in the way of father issues. And for both these issues are reflected in the dichotomy of their adult lives. Early in the film they cut-away to the second floor window of Elias Disney's office on Disneyland's Main Street, Walt's tribute to the work ethic instilled in him by his father. Later Disney attributes the motivation behind his retreat into imagination to bitterness about a childhood which was anything but whimsical.
Those behind "Saving Mr. Banks" understood what it is like to still be wrestling with childhood demons throughout adulthood and they knew how to make the viewer feel the struggle.
On the other hand the saving of Mr. Banks premise is a non-factor in the Mary Poppins books (the original and the sequels). The film would be more accurately named "Saving Mr. (Elias) Disney". Apparently Travers was appalled before, during, and after the screening of the dumbed down film adaptation of her books. And by all accounts she carried her litany of objections to her grave, never permitting a sequel. For 50 years avid readers have been mystified by the adaptation's unrecognizable theme and its peculiar areas of emphasis. The adaptation did not include Travers' best chapter (Mary Popping's birthday party at the zoo among the animals) nor her best character (the star Maia from the Pleiades cluster of the Taurus constellation - who Jane and Michael help in her human form to pick out Christmas gifts for her six sisters). Instead they fabricated additional scenes for the horribly miscast Dick Van Dyke - whose casting even "Saving Mr. Banks" acknowledges as being entirely for commercial purposes.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.