Stretch Your Mind Beyond, or Trip A Little Light Fantastic

As I mentioned a few posts back, by suggestion I re-watched Saving Mr. Banks again and planned to blog some thoughts on it. That of course got delayed, but NOW I plan to share my thoughts about that movie, and as a bonus I have also re-watched Mary Poppins Returns since that time, so why not talk about both?

First, the original task at hand: Saving Mr. Banks. In case you didn’t know, this 2013 film covers the period of time in which Walt Disney himself was attempting to procure the film rights to Mary Poppins from the very difficult author of the books, P.L. Travers. Many of their meetings were recorded and these tapes were the inspiration for the film. Emma Thompson plays Travers and as Walt, it’s the critic-proof Tom Hanks! I remember hearing about Saving Mr Banks nearly a year before it was released, and when I heard the film’s premise and casting I thought “THAT’S going to be a thing?” It just seemed so niche, so specific, a story that only someone like me would care to ever see dramatized. About six months before its release I saw the first released press photo of Tom Hanks as Walt with Emma Thompson as Travers, got very excited and it quickly became my most anticipated film of that year. For many years this screenplay went unproduced because well, only Disney could probably make this movie. The suits at Disney recognized the merits, but there were also risks for the brand in producing a movie that featured its founder as one of the subjects. Great care was taken in making Tom Hanks authentic as possible in his portrayal of Walt; however, the movie falls short in several other places in regards to its attention to details. Here are some of my “hot takes”…

-I made a couple observations that didn’t seem right to me at first but I was able to confirm them thanks mostly to IMDB trivia. First, when Travers arrives at the airport in America, the studio logos seen on the drivers signs are not accurate to how they would’ve looked at that time (minor detail but I’m a design student and come on, how lazy can one be to overlook such an easy detail? The film is set around 1961, and when Travers arrives In her hotel, there are stuffed versions of Disney characters there to greet her… Mickey, Minnie and Winnie the Pooh among them.

-Wait, Winnie the Pooh? His first appearance as a “Disney character” wasn’t until 1966. Another easy detail that you think the Disney company would’ve caught and not let happen.

-Two observations about the sequence in which Walt take Travers to Disneyland, the first is a forgivable one. Obviously, these scenes were filmed at the actual Disneyland, parts of which look considerably different now than they did in the early 1960s. Fantasyland underwent a major facelift and revamp in 1983, and that section looks very little now like it did then. You can’t really work around that I suppose, but here’s a sloppy one: if you look closely at the entrance gates of the park, they dressed the scene to look as it did in 1961…except they didn’t remove the modern check-in computers! You can actually see them in several shots.

-Saving Mr. Banks received just a single Oscar nomination: for its score. Interring, as I feel the score is its weakest point. The score feels cheap and off the shelf, generic tunes hardly worthy of keeping up alongside Mary Poppins Sherman Brothers score (which is thankfully used quite prominently throughout this film as well.)

-Colin Farrell plays Travers’s father in the flashback scenes. I really am not a Colin Farrell fan.

-I think the depiction of Travers is a bit much. I’m sure the stories of her being difficult are somewhat true (they’ve got recordings that prove that), but they really make her a volatile unpleasant and awful person. Rude to EVERYONE she comes in contact with, and downright bratty. It’s hard to get on her side or empathize with her.

I know many of these sound negative, but I actually really do love and appreciate this movie. It makes a wonderful sort of supplemental or “bonus feature” to the original film. And the parts they get right…they REALLY get right.

And as for Mary Poppins Returns…at first it seemed audacious to me that this would be the right time, more than 50 years after the original, for a Mary Poppins sequel, or that there was a need or merit for any sequel, but this movie rises to the occasion. It take a lot of what worked about the first one and creates something that feels familiar. 2-D animated sequences, songs and stars that remind you of the original (some maybe a little too much?) and it pulls in several things from the books that were actually utilized in the Mary Poppins stage musical! There is a plot point that involves the now grown Banks children losing their childhood home to the evil bank manager now in charge of their father’s former employer, the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. These are stakes that weren’t needed in the original, there was no villain to speak of in that film, and this is the only thing that really deviates (unsuccessfully in my opinion) from the highly successful formula of the first film. Nevertheless, Mary Poppins Returns is quite possibly the most classic "Disney feeling" film since maybe the first Mary Poppins (or at least Bedknobs and Broomsticks). Plus Dick Van Dyke has a cameo, and he now looks like the old age make-up he wore in the first movie as the bank manager!

It’s late. I think I’ll be done for now…

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back again soon!