Saving Mr. Banks

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2014)

If people do not realize the darkness at the core of every Disney movie, they do not understand Disney...
Pamela Travers--pen name for Emily Goff whose alcoholic father was Travers Goff--created the children's storyline of Mary Poppins. Walt Disney attempted for something like 16 years to get Pamela Travers to allow him to turn her stories into a movie. Finally, she relents because royalties have diminished. But working with a recalcitrant Pamela Travers, taxes both the Disney patience and the patience of the creative talent. She walks out on the project with the notion of animated penguins.
It is only when Disney visits her London home, and shares with her the pain they both have in common as part of the creative process does she relent and allow the movie to be completed.
The movie is based on the book "Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers" by Valerie Lawson and "Moose" by Robert Sherman.
Apparently, P.L. Travers did not like the movie "Mary Poppins" one single bit. The movie, however, suggests displeasure as she watches the premiere, but also hints at ultimate approval of the final production.
The movie flashbacks to Pamala Travers childhood in 1901 Australia coping with a destructive alcoholic father, and a mother at her wit's end with his alcoholism. What might now be considered a home-health worker comes to help the family in the father's dying days--and this woman becomes morphed into Mary Poppins. So the flashbacks explain all.
Tom Hanks channels Disney excellently--he captures Walt Disney vocal intonation--close your eyes and you would think it was Walt Disney himself speaking; Emma Thompson channels the asperity of Pamalea Travers with equal accuracy--she approves of nothing and finds fault with everything.
The movie is not really 'about' Disney, Travers, or the making of Mary Poppins; the movie is 'about' the source of creativity. Where does that spark come from? When we look at creative people, it is surprising how much lose of early sibling death seems to play a role. James Barrie--"Peter Pan"--had an older brother die; Mark Twain lost a brother to death. Disney recounts to Pamale Travers his own tortured childhood to show that he too understands Pamala Travers' tortured childhood--alcoholics are dead spiritually--and this the child knows intuitively--as the drunk's eyes glaze over, the speech becomes volubly manic, the body disconnects from the cerebellum only to fall down drunk--The child intuits whats going on and understands in that way that only children can express. (Robert Sherman needs a cane because he was shot... No explanation in the movie why or how or where...) Pamala Travers took her pen name from her father's first name Travers.
In the end of "Mary Poppins", the Banks family sings that joyful tune "Let's go fly a kite" with a tattered kite repaired, and the sister suffragette sash as a tail for kite ballast... And of course, Mary Poppins flies off...
For those who saw the movie when it came out in 1964, repeating the songs brings back the tinge of memory, of remembrance of time past...