Movie Review: Saving Mr. Banks is a treasure

Thinking that her beloved nanny would be mauled by the Hollywood machine and turned into a frivolous musical, this curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer told a dismayed Disney in no uncertain terms that she would not relent.

Disney’s daughters had begged him to make a movie about their favourite character, Mary Poppins, and he made them a promise that he would, but he didn’t know it would take 20 years for that plan to become reality.

Travers’s book had stopped selling and money was tight, so she reluctantly agreed to travel to Los Angeles to hear Disney’s plans for the adaptation. This film covers the two weeks she spent in America in 1961, when Walt Disney and his team pulled out all the stops to convince her to sell the rights to her book.

The Sherman brothers (BJ Novak, left, and Jason Schwatzman) do their best to help Walt Disney convince author PL Travers that her work will receive a sympathetic adaptation for the big screen.

Disney gives her a chatty driver (Paul Giamatti), who talks up the beauty of Los Angeles and provides her with a personal tour of Disneyland. He allows her to critique the script and expresses to her what Mary Poppins means to him. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the talented Sherman brothers (BJ Novak and Jason Schwartzman), Disney launches a total onslaught on the author, who still refuses to budge.

The main storyline is brilliantly supported by a series of emotional flashbacks to Travers’ childhood in the Australian bush and her relationship with her banker father, who was an alcoholic. Moving back and forth between 1906 Australia and 1961 Los Angeles, the film provides a comprehensive study of the writer, who is played as a child by Annie Rose Buckley and as a sixty-something woman by Emma Thompson.

PL Travers (Emma Thompson) is concerned that a Hollywood-style imagining of her Mary Poppins story will ruin the work.

Director John Lee Hancock cleverly weaves these separate stories to emphasise connections that are not initially evident. The first follows the exploits of the eight-year old Travers as she and her family settle in a ramshackle home and try to forge a life in isolated territory.

Her father, Travers Goff (Colin Farrell), views this experience as a great adventure and his passion fires his daughter’s excitement. Her mother, Margaret (Ruth Wilson), however, is not at all enthusiastic.

Hancock’s enchanting slice of cinematic history is brought magically to life by the talents of Emma Thompson, as Travers, and Tom Hanks as the charming and persuasive Disney, whose mannerisms, say those in the know, are spot on. These two magnificent performers, given an excellent script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, do full justice to a heart-warming story. It has substance and emotional gravitas as it highlights Travers’s own sad childhood.

The film’s tone is light and the emotional elements are never overwrought. This film is a treasure.