Saturday 21 December 2013

Saving Mr. Banks - by Danny


This was a decent movie, as I expected it to be. Good solid family entertainment, from John Lee Hancock, the director of The Blind Side. But it wasn't terribly exciting.

The whole film is more or less a tribute to Mary Poppins, and by the end it makes you think you'd much rather be watching that instead. If you'd never heard of Mary Poppins, then Saving Mr. Banks wouldn't have much interest at all.

There's a bit of light comedy. Emma Thompson as the English author is excessively reserved and proper, and duly shocked by all of the Disney vulgarity. The Americans are correspondingly happy all the time. I'm pretty sure most English people aren't actually like their stereotype, not sure if Americans are or not.

As Walt Disney Tom Hanks looks like Tom Hanks with a moustache and slightly droopy eyes. He is suitably genial, and in fact is much more interesting than P. L. Travers. I'd rather have a bit more Disney back story, and a bit less Travers. Her flashback scenes are all pretty good though, and surprisingly Colin Farrell is actually quite moving as her drunken Australian father, Travers Goff.

Disney is shown drinking only once, and in one scene has a sneaky cigarette too. This aspect of his life has obviously been suppressed as it's a Disney movie, but I have a good theory about that. I think that actually the film is a lot more of a biography of Walt Disney than it appears to be, and the happy-go-lucky Travers Goff is really a metaphor for Mr. Disney himself. Goff is certainly a dreamer, who believes nothing is more important than imagination. He also neglects his family, in a way that I imagine Walt Disney probably did too (but I don't actually know anything about him).

Overall then, enjoyable at the time, but I don't want to watch it again.