And I wanted to. I really did.
For a couple of weeks now, friends have been telling me they loved it or hated it. The latter group for the most part felt it was a Disney corporate whitewash. Walt and Mrs. Travers famously clashed over the making of the movie, Mary Poppins. He ultimately prevailed and made it his way…and the film makes him out to be folksy and benevolent and maybe not as interested in the Almighty Buck as most folks think Mr. Disney usually was. And it makes P.L. Travers out to be a pretty nasty, emotionally screwed-up person…which maybe she was but since the film wasn't made by the Travers Company, it kinda feels like the deck was stacked at least a bit against her.
I'm not saying it isn't an honest portrayal. A lot of observers are arguing that it isn't but all I'm saying is that even if it is, I didn't enjoy the film. Before I go any farther with this, I think I'd better put up one of these…
Okay then. Maybe some of my problems were in my expectations. I was expecting the story of an author fighting for the integrity of her work…or maybe for her version of her creation versus Mr. Disney's. It isn't either. The P.L. Travers of this movie is wrong about everything and Disney and his charges are always right. This is not a movie about the debate over how Ms. Travers' famous nanny was to be portrayed on the screen. It's more of a movie about how long will it be before this crazy, disturbed woman goes away and lets Disney make that wonderful movie we all love?
If the P.L. Travers of this film made one valid creative point, I missed it. She's just a horrible, horrible woman who is nasty to everyone for no good reason. She's rude to flight attendants, bellhops, people who bring her cakes, people who don't serve her tea the way she wants it. She doesn't even bother to learn the name of the ultra-friendly limo driver who's trying so hard to please her.
Does she have any legitimate concerns about what the Disney folks want to do to her property? Apparently, not. Her demands are irrational, the rantings of a crazy woman who has deep, personal inner-demons that are unleashed by the prospect of someone else touching her beloved Mary Poppins. So what if she has problems with Dick Van Dyke playing Bert? This is a person who has problems with Jello-molds and with green apples in her fruit basket and with the color red and with other people offering to carry her luggage.
I'm not qualified to say if the real P.L. Travers was like that. I am qualified to say that I didn't enjoy watching a movie about a woman who was like that.
My friend Floyd Norman worked on the film, believes it is an accurate representation, and likes it very much. So does Richard Sherman, who's depicted in it and consulted on it and who I ran into and discussed it with before I'd seen it. Friday evening at a party of animation folks, Floyd came up to me, jokingly waving his arms and gasping, "You didn't like the movie? You didn't like the movie?" I told him I didn't and I told him why. I had almost the exact same conversation soon after with Richard Sherman. He thought a moment and agreed my point was valid in its way. Or at least, he realized we had more in common than he'd thought: He didn't like spending two weeks around that woman and I didn't like spending two hours. (He still loves the film, of course.)
Both of them, by the way, think Tom Hanks was a good Walt. I didn't like Hanks in the trailer. He seemed too much like a performer — a guy at-ease in front of a camera — rather than the famously awkward-in-that-position Walt Disney. But since those guys who actually knew Walt bought Hanks in the role, I felt awkward in my position, dissenting…and there's a lesson to be learned here: Don't judge an actor by the trailer. Watching the whole film, I understood why they liked him.
But I still didn't like Travers and I wasn't even all that impressed with Emma Thompson. It's the kind of role that garners awards and she'll probably get many. At the risk of sounding like the cinematic P.L. Travers finding negatives in every conceivable place, I thought it was a shallow characterization…though maybe that wasn't Ms. Thompson's fault. Leaving aside all questions of whether the depiction of Travers was authentic, the character arc of that person on the screen didn't seem to me that it was.
The change didn't seem real to me. It was like she changed because we needed to get to a Happy Ending…and given what came before and the fact that the real Travers famously disliked the finished film, this was as close as they could get to one. So let me see if I understand this…
She arrived full of hate for everything Walt Disney did and stood for and everything he wanted to do to her treasured Mary Poppins. So I don't like this woman because of the way she treats people who are just doing their jobs and I don't know why she even considering signing the rights over to a company that so obviously, to her, doesn't have a clue how to do right by it. Does she think they can manufacture a movie that will precisely match her version of her character? Then she's stupid. Is she just trying because she needs the money? Then she's dishonest with herself and everyone.
But as the flashbacks unfold, we see that she has real issues swirling around the death of her father — crippling issues that helped shape her books perhaps but left her bitter and angry at everyone. If nothing else, they go pretty deep…so deep that I can't accept that a mere two weeks of flashing back to her childhood could put any sort of meaningful dent in them. Not even an impromptu picnic with Paul Giamatti, and the surprising discovery that other people have feelings and children, shouldn't alter a life built for so long on so much anger.
Then she flees back to London and Walt follows her for a heart-to-heart they somehow couldn't have back in Burbank. He had to show he cared not by dealing with her on his turf (his studio, his theme park) but hers and inconveniencing himself greatly to get there and unburden his heart. Somehow, this woman who so far has trusted no one about anything, trusts his words, views him as someone she can relate to. There's some kind of epiphany there which conflates Walt, Mr. Banks and her father into one figure and I'm not quite sure why but she finally signs a document that not only gives Disney the rights to the only thing (apparently) of value in her life but in the process waives all promises of script approval and no animated penguins.
Her whole experience with Disney — wherein she got nothing she wanted except the check, and he did everything to her beloved character she had nightmares about him doing — somehow left her for the better. In the beginning, she was on the verge of losing her home because she'd been unable to write another Mary Poppins book for a long time. She'd even had to let a servant go…and by the way, that's gotta be a sweet gig: Servant for a woman who won't let anyone do anything for her.
And then after her Disney Catharsis, there she is, happily writing a new Mary Poppins book. It's not for the money. Walt's check cleared. She has money. She's even hired a new servant and she sufficiently recovered from her horrible experience to take herself back to the States on her own dime to attend the premiere. During the film, she cries. Is she crying because she hates the film? Is she crying because it reminds her of Dad? I'm not sure but if forced to guess, I'd venture the real P.L. Travers would have cried for the first reason and the fictional one would have cried for the second.
If it all works for you, great. I'm not saying you're wrong and if you haven't seen the film — in which case, you probably shouldn't have read anything here after the Spoiler Alert — you might well love it. Lots of people have. I'm just saying it didn't work for me. And that's why I didn't like Saving Mr. Banks. And hey…I wonder if the DVD's going to have a featurette showing how the actor playing Walt Disney got rid of that mustache after filming was over. They could call it — and I apologize in advance for this — Shaving Mr. Hanks.