Saving Mr Banks

Because Saving Mr Banks is a Disney production, Walt is played by Tom Hanks instead of Joe Pesci. And very well too, continuing from Captain Phillips Hanks’s personification of decency under duress.

Peel back the layers. 

(i) The film is about how the Mary Poppins film came to be made, how Disney had to overcome the arch prejudices of the source novelist Pamela Travers (marvelous Emma Thompson). We also get a glimpse into the creation process, as a team concocts a musical one tune at a time, bar by bar, yet the team still purveys a very personal vision.

(ii) The film is about how the novel came to be composed, how the story — much bleaker both in plot and heroine than the original film — grew out of the author’s life and needs. Flashbacks to Travers’ childhood and her bittersweet relationship with her drunken irresponsible and doomed dreamer father discover the sources of the adult woman’s aversions to red and to pears. More importantly, it reveals her unconscious need to redeem her father and to forgive her own childhood failure to save him. As we’ve often been told, art is how the artist works out personal neuroses. As Disney teaches Travers, art enables us too change our story, to see our past influences whole rather than in a limited, specific part, and to learn to forgive, ourselves as well as others. Disney’s clue into Travers’ fictionalizing of herself lies in discovering her pen-name. She is a story as much as she tells one. Thus this plot broadens from saving the children to saving Mr Banks — to saving Pamela Travers.

(iii) That represents Disney too, as he reveals his own harsh and traumatic childhood and a cruel father he has learned to respect and love. So this film is a justification of the Disney canon, saving it from charges of unreal cheer. From the beginning the Disney classics were far from the escapist romances we dismiss them as. Rather like the profound fairy tales  on which they often drew, they took on the eternal realities of death, loss, helplessness, even the first stirrings of sexuality and adult experience. That’s the spoonful of medicine that makes the sugar go up. The best primer on classic Disney remains Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment.

If the film is a Disneyfication of the Walt-Pamela clash of wills, it’s also a reminder of the psychological depth and serious purpose of the best Disney films (among which this should be securely numbered). When Disney seats Travers on the merry-go-round he unwittingly connects to her childhood memories of her romanticizing father’s white nag and its harness of his fantasies. Disney’s genius lay in his intuitive ability to treat weighty themes in tones both bright and light. Against all odds, by getting a proper read on Ms Travers’ persona Mr Disney does manage to turn the curmudgeon into the “cavorting and twinkling” into which she dreaded he would convert her Mary Poppins. Hollywood, after all, is jasmine as much as it is her “chlorine, and sweat.”