No! No! No! Mr Disney!

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2013)

The "Mr Banks" of the title is not a comrade-in-arms of Private Ryan but the stern paterfamilias from "Mary Poppins". The film's subject-matter is the negotiations between Walt Disney and Pamela Travers, the author of "Mary Poppins", about the film rights to her book. It is sometimes assumed that all writers hate film adaptations of their works, and only sell the rights because they need the money, but this is by no means always the case. Dodie Smith, for example, loved the Disney cartoon of "101 Dalmatians", even though it is by no means 100% faithful to her novel. In the case of Travers, however, this assumption appears to be quite correct. According to this film she disliked the idea of "Mary Poppins" being filmed, only entered into negotiations because she was in dire financial straits, and drove Disney and his studio executives to distraction with her cavilling and nit-picking demands.
Alternating with the scenes set in sixties California are those depicting Travers' childhood in Edwardian Queensland. (Everyone assumed Travers was British, but she was actually Australian by birth. Her real name was Helen Goff, "Pamela Travers" being a stage name adopted during her career as an actress). The film's thesis seems to be firstly that the fictitious Mr. Banks was inspired by Travers' memories of her own father and secondly that the theme of the novel is how Mary Poppins "saves" Banks by revealing his better nature and preventing him from being a strict, bad-tempered, authoritarian old patriarch. Only when Disney shows that he appreciates what the novel is all about does Travers drop her opposition to a film version.
Unfortunately, the story told here does not always seem to bear out that thesis. In the first place, I don't recall from my own memories of the books that George Banks was such a domestic tyrant; that seems to have been Disney's conception rather than Travers's. Secondly, Mr Goff, as played by Colin Farrell, is far from stern or authoritarian. Although he is, like Banks, an employee of a bank, he is a kindly and loving father. His faults are very different ones; he is perhaps too indulgent with his children, and he is an alcoholic who has damaged both his health and his career by heavy drinking. He is a sensitive, imaginative man, but it is implied that he is not really suited to a career in banking and that the incompatibility between his personality and his profession may be at the root of his personal troubles.
Both Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks have been praised for their performances, even talked of as possible Oscar candidates, but I was less impressed. Thompson has described Travers as "a woman of quite eye- watering complexity and contradiction," and there seems to have been a lot of truth in this characterisation. That was not, however, the impression I was left with from this film. Her Travers seemed to me to be far from complex, simply an upper-middle-class English spinster with the personality of a pedantic, pernickety schoolmarm. ("No, no, no, Mr Disney!") Thompson's performance is technically a good one- if you wanted a one-dimensional portrayal of an upper-middle-class English spinster with the personality of a pedantic, pernickety schoolmarm it could hardly be bettered- but there was no way in which I could imagine this woman as a creative artist of any kind. This came as a disappointment, as I have greatly admired Thompson in some of her earlier films, such as "Much Ado about Nothing", "Sense and Sensibility", "Howard's End" and "An Education".
As for Hanks, Hollywood's resident Mr Nice Guy achieves a convincing visual likeness to Walt Disney, but struck me as far too avuncular. By all accounts Disney was a shrewd, not to say ruthless, businessman and difficult to work for, but these aspects of his character do not come across here. (To say nothing of all those rumours of racism, anti- Semitism and Fascist sympathies). Disney's determination to film "Mary Poppins" is explained by a promise he once made to his two daughters, not by the money he stands to make if the film is a success. (By the time the film appeared in 1964 Disney's daughters were aged 31 and 28 and probably no longer worried about a promise their father had made to them as children). "Saving Mr Banks" also tactfully omits the fact that Travers hated the film of "Mary Poppins" and refused permission for any more of her books to be filmed, which explains why such a massively successful film was not followed by any sequels.
There are some good supporting performances, notably from Paul Giamatti as Travers's chauffeur Ralph from Farrell and from Annie Buckley who plays Travers as a young girl. I felt that the Australian scenes were the best part of film, and wondered if it might have been more interesting had it been made as a straightforward biography of Travers without concentrating on the Disney angle. But of course, "Saving Mr. Banks" was made by none other than Walt Disney Pictures, who were not going to miss the opportunity to generate some good PR for their company. If some other studio had produced it we might have ended up with a more honest film. 6/10