In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Tom Hanks was charged with the rescue of a sole surviving sibling soldier following the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy.
In SAVING MR. BANKS, Tom Hanks is charged with preserving his promise to make a picture based on Mary Poppins. His nemesis here isn’t the Nazis but the creator of the world’s most famous nanny, P.L. Travers, played here with ferocious frostiness by Emma Thompson.
Production of Poppins was a prickly and precarious project, with the author insistent that there be no animation and no songs. The producer, Walt Disney, while wanting to honour the author and the source material, knew that in order for Mary to fly from the page to the screen, a modicum of movie magic would be a spoonful of cinematic sugar. Aided and abetted by the song writing siblings, the Sherman brothers, Walt battled long and hard to reconcile the adaption with the author and realise his long gestating dream of producing a Mary Poppins picture.
SAVING MR BANKS is not only a fascinating film about the making of a bona fide classic motion picture, but of the back story of the author and the genesis of the character and story that would make her name.
Travers early childhood was in Australia where her father was a banker. But certainly not of the staid and sober stereotype. Fleet of fantasy and a bugger for the bottle, his fun loving and inspiring imagination as a doting dad was drowned in delinquent drunkenness that brought the family to the brink of despair and destitution.
These formative years’ flashbacks are effectively fleshed into the fabric of the film and star Colin Farrell as the father and Rachel Griffiths as the prototype Poppins, a maternal aunt come to pick up the pieces.
Reluctant and recalcitrant in the role of Travers, Emma Thompson is a tower of turmoil, a buttress against the perceived plasticity of America and Hollywood in particular.
Hanks is a delight as Disney, courtly, avuncular, with a showbiz shrewdness that scabbards the ruthless determination to persuade and assuage the author of all her doubts about the screen adaptation.
As the Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, Jason Schwartzman and B J Novak are befuddled and bewildered by Travers’ stonewalling of their songs and score, but the belief in their tunes and lyrics and their irrepressible showmanship chip away at her chagrin.
Another marvelous performance from the prolific Paul Giamatti in the guise of a Disney driver despatched to chauffer the chilly writer around. His warm humanity and humour helps defrost the ice maiden façade that she has cultivated, a defence mechanism perhaps against sunny dispositions that are wont to disappear under a cloud of despair and desertion.
Screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Australian Sue Smith have woven a wonderful script about complex characters and the process of creativity, and director John Lee Hancock mines the material for all its worth.
Nominated for 13 Academy Awards, Mary Poppins won 5 Oscars, including Best Score and Best Song by the Sherman Brothers.
Inconceivable to think of Mary Poppins without the songs, it’s inconceivable to miss seeing this remarkable and highly entertaining telling of the fight not only to save Mr Banks but to present Mary Poppins to a new, wider and appreciative audience.
Only time will tell if SAVING MR BANKS collects the same swag of Oscars but in the meantime it deserves to be a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious success.