John Lee Hancock (2013)
Seeing Mary Poppins at the cinema at the age of eight or nine is a happy, if vague, memory. I really enjoyed it so, in contrast to much of The Sound of Music, I didn’t need to pretend I’d had the good time I was expected to have. I read the P L Travers book after watching the film – that memory is even slighter: I recall only that the book was meaner. Victoria Coren Mitchell, who presented The Secret Life of Mary Poppins, a BBC documentary screened to coincide with the release of Saving Mr Banks, admitted that she was disappointed when she first saw the Disney movie – she found it soft, lacking the darkness of the books that she’d already read, but she also made clear that she’d been as troubled by that darkness as she was intrigued by it. Coren Mitchell was clearly affected too by seeing Saving Mr Banks at its recent premiere (the film closed this year’s London Film Festival). She felt that John Lee Hancock’s account of the making of Mary Poppins, like the original movie, falsified its source material – but that it was, nevertheless, emotionally effective. ‘We want to believe, as much now as we did in 1964,’ she said, ‘that redemption is possible, and that is both the lie and the miracle of Hollywood films’. Saving Mr Banks is more unusual than I’d feared from the trailer and the clips shown in the BBC documentary. The premiere of Mary Poppins at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is the climax to Hancock’s film and it is affecting. Both Emma Thompson as P L Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney have their best moments here. As the lights go down, Hanks’s eyes light up with anticipation – he expresses the excitement of both a film fan and a movie mogul. Thompson’s Travers can’t control her tears as she watches Mary Poppins but she never stops trying. If you remember seeing it with pleasure and affection, the snatches of Mary Poppins on the screen add to this potent combination. But I don’t see at all in Saving Mr Banks ‘the lie and the miracle’ seen by Victoria Coren Mitchell. The movie held my interest thanks to a tension, which is almost wholly unresolved, between the film-makers’ desire to give the audience a good time and their recognition that the story they’re telling is an unhappy one. Saving Mr Banks doesn’t work either as a heartwarmer or as a penetrating psychological drama but there are some compelling things in it.
With Tom Hanks in the cast, the film’s title naturally makes you think of Saving Private Ryan but it also conveys the main idea of the screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith: that Mary Poppins emerged from the transient highs and enduring lows of P L Travers’ relationship with her father – a warm, humorous romancer whose drink problem ended his career in banking. Walt Disney allegedly tried to secure the movie rights for Mary Poppins, first published in 1934, from the moment he saw how the book delighted one of his young daughters. Saving Mr Banks describes the culmination of his decades-long campaign, when Travers’ agent (Ronan Vibert) persuades her that she needs money badly enough to accept Disney’s invitation to come to Los Angeles to talk business. Her fortnight there ends with Travers still refusing to sign on the dotted line (the last straw is when she discovers the movie is to include sequences in which human beings share the screen with cartoon figures). It’s only when she’s back in London – when Disney turns up unannounced on her doorstep one evening and, just as improbably, briskly psychoanalyses Travers – that she capitulates: Disney tells her to let go of the past and to think how marvellous it will be every time that a child watches Mary Poppins and sees the peevish banker-paterfamilias Mr Banks transformed into a loving father who goes flying a kite with his children.
Far too much of the screen time in Saving Mr Banks is taken up with flashbacks to the Australian childhood of P L Travers, née Helen Goff, in the early years of last century. The first one or two scenes are OK: as the father, Colin Farrell is better than usual and there’s a good connection between him and Annie Rose Buckley, whose Helen is wonderstruck by her father yet who also has a solemn, doubtful quality – she seems to apprehend that things will go wrong. But, once they do, these sequences are heavy going, not because they’re emotionally tough but because they’re wearingly obvious. The patterning of details between the Los Angeles scenes and the Australian ones, so that you see the source of the middle-aged P L Travers’ fears and neuroses and how certain things got into the book and the movie made from it, is crass – a how-many-connections-did-you-spot test. John Lee Hancock also badly overworks the symbolic significance of Mickey Mouse in the proceedings. When she first arrives in her suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, P L Travers can hardly move for the Disney merchandise on display: she turns a giant Mickey to face away from the room and towards the window but later on, after a particularly traumatic flashback, she lies on her hotel bed cuddling him. When she eventually signs over the film rights, she sits at a table in her London home with the same oversized toy in the chair opposite (although he didn’t appear to be in her luggage for the journey back from Hollywood). When she goes to the premiere at Grauman’s, a Mickey Mouse usher takes her arm and escorts her in. It would be a naff idea even if Hancock showed Travers imagining most of the Mickey encounters but there’s no reason to think they’re not all meant to be real.
At first, Emma Thompson’s portrait of P L Travers is grating – the pained, pursed face, the querulous manner, the set, stiff walk. She’s bossy and reproving with everyone – a cross between Julie Andrews and Margaret Thatcher. Needless to say, it was Thompson’s most obvious English schoolmarm one-liners – putting down these Americans whose grammar needs improving! – that were most audibly appreciated by some in the sparse audience at the Richmond Odeon. Although she continues to irritate, Thompson has some arresting moments. She has considerable neurotic force – she gets across in her eyes and her constricted bearing the dammed unhappiness of the woman she’s playing. Thompson is both advantaged and disadvantaged by a viewer’s having seen the television documentary. Marcel and Smith’s screenplay doesn’t supply enough either to explain P L Travers’ antipathy to the world or to describe her way of life: there’s a perfunctory shot of a book by Gurdjieff in her London home; asked if she has any children, she replies ‘not really’ or words to that effect – a remark I’d have found baffling if I’d not watched the Victoria Coren Mitchell programme. (At the age of forty, Travers, who lived alone, adopted a baby boy called Camillus – in preference to his twin brother Anthony – on the advice of her astrologer. Camillus didn’t know who his real parents were until he was seventeen and Anthony arrived unexpectedly at Travers’s house.) You can link Thompson’s clipped dissatisfaction with various biographical details that you picked up from the documentary.
This interpretation of P L Travers is clearly worked out: Emma Thompson has a persistent dynamism that’s born of suppression and the stylish, close-fitting clothes that Daniel Orlandi has dressed her in match her state of mind. Once you’ve seen and heard the original Travers, though, you know Thompson is nowhere near eccentric enough. (It’s not only because she’s Australian that I wish that Judy Davis had been considered for the role, once discussions with Meryl Streep hadn’t worked out.) P L Travers insisted that her negotiations with Disney et al were recorded and an excerpt from one of these sessions is played during the closing credits of Saving Mr Banks; it’s remarkable but it doesn’t do Emma Thompson any favours. The problem isn’t that she’s different from Travers but that she creates a more circumscribed, a less crazy and troubling personality – and, because the script is superficial, she can’t go deeper into character.
Walt Disney Pictures (with BBC Films) made the film so you don’t expect a hatchet job on the studio’s founder. In his early scenes, Tom Hanks’s ease is a welcome counterpoint to Emma Thompson’s tight rhythms; he’s good too at combining Disney’s affability, anxiety and ruthlessness as a negotiator. (Once the deal is done, the courtship of P L Travers is over: she doesn’t get invited to the premiere of Mary Poppins although she manages to gatecrash.) Hanks’s portrait is very benign, though, and his performance feels anticipatory nearly all the way through (until those startling few seconds in the Grauman’s auditorium). The structure of the relationship between Travers and her (presumably fictional) driver in Los Angeles suggests a miniature of what the film-makers would have liked the main Disney-Travers relationship to be. She’s frosty and negative with the driver at first but, like Disney, he refuses to stop looking on the bright side in trying to make conversation with his ill-tempered passenger. Once he’s told her about his disabled daughter, she begins to thaw – and to trust him enough to lower her guard occasionally. Eventually, she even asks his name – it’s Ralph – and tells him he’s the only American she’s ever liked. The role’s a tired idea but Paul Giamatti makes Ralph real and funny. As the Sherman brothers, Jason Schwartzman (Richard M) and B J Novak (Robert B) are both good: there’s a very strong bit when Travers objects vehemently to something they’ve written and Robert asks her why it matters. The question pierces her and she’s flustered: she doesn’t know why – she knows only that she has to tell them off. The rest of Disney’s team comprises Bradley Whitford (as Don DaGradi, the co-writer of the screenplay for Mary Poppins), Kathy Baker (I assumed she was Disney’s senior secretary but Wikipedia describes her as ‘a trusted studio executive’) and Melanie Paxson (an eager-to-please PA). As Travers’s father goes downhill, Colin Farrell turns hollow; Ruth Wilson (as his wife) and Rachel Griffiths (as her no-nonsense sister – evidently the physical model for Mary Poppins) do well enough but to limited effect because the Australian scenes are so essentially schematic. The score is by Thomas Newman, who keeps adjusting it into something more generic and less idiosyncratic. Saving Mr Banks’s certificate warns that it ‘contains scenes of emotional upset’ and I’d have thought it was entirely unsuitable for children. It pits an immovable object against an irresistible force. Nothing really gives in this unsatisfying, odd film.
6 December 2013
