Review: "Saving Mr. Banks" is cute behind the scenes based on Mary Poppins

"Saving Mr. Banks" PG 13
John Lee Hancock's lavish and sweeping tale of PL Travers' famous book turned to movie, Mary Poppins, is sometimes charming and interesting, and the acting is solid. This late comer to the winter line up means Oscar will notice, but as best picture, it might be lacking a bit. Scenes of the distant past of the early 1900s Australia are inter cut with the 1961 Los Angeles US sale of Mary Poppins to the Walt Disney company. Even if it isn't quite what actually happened, Hollywood hits the right tune in this flick.

What really happened is PL Travers had already sold the rights to the book before she even jetted to LA to help direct the pitching of the movie and what was going to be in it, according to many sources and the biographies.

They do no dispute the father figure angle though, so all the bleak and dreary contrast with young PL and her drunk father are canon.

The stuff almost 50 years later is where the magic is, even though it's not the kite song that got to the author, but the one about birds.

She never did like that movie and after the premiere refused to see it again. Twenty years later, she apparently relented and watched it again.

The emotional resonance they're trying for does work, and Hanks and Thompson are certainly performing Oscar worthy roles, and it's Oscar time.

Oh and the broken down white horse is different in the riding scene, as someone noticed.

Even though it's a fine film and trying to tell a story. It doesn't need to be picked apart all that much.  They give you a feel for an old western like town, in Australia, and a feel for 1960's LA and a redressed Disneyland, made up to look like it did back then. I wasn't there. In 1978 it looked much like that.

Oh and the Disney visits Travers at home scene is total fiction, but visually they had to do that as it needed closure. Had they ended it in a non typical Hollywood way, it would have been jarring.

I wonder though, was it necessary to even include the old Australia parts? Maybe without them it could have been more like a Disney movie. 

Review by Adam Browne