No matter what you think of
Walt Disney’s elaborate musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), the Disney
company is determined you believe it was a
milestone in filmmaking. Which it very well may be--for Disney, and for
baby boomers like me who remember with great fondness the first time they saw
it in the theater. You can judge for yourself if it deserves more than nostalgic affection by checking out the 50th
anniversary dvd/blueray released last December. But before that happened, Disney provided an ingenious bit of pre-release publicity to indulge in with Saving Mr. Banks, a film that purports to be a behind-the-scenes, tell-all tale about the making of the film, specifically the trials Walt and his creative team went through collaborating with the enigmatic author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers. Turns out the collaboration wasn't practically perfect in every way. Neither is the movie, but it's filled with enough intriguing notions and expert performances to make it more than just a superior confection--and it very well may represent a new milestone in Disney's unique brand of self-mythologizing.
The film combines two storylines--in the first, the adult Travers (Emma Thompson, in a terrific performance) visits California to work on the script of the proposed movie, and in the second, her difficult childhood on a farm in Australia is unveiled in a series of flashbacks. Travers resisted Disney's overtures to bring her beloved character to the screen for nearly twenty years. But in need of money, she considers signing a contract with the persistent film mogul. The resulting trip to California to meet with Disney and his staff is an unpleasant duty to her, not a promising opportunity, and unsurprisingly is filled with physical and emotional discomforts. Sitting in a cramped airplane seat, she begins to remember another reluctant journey, one she took with her family as a young girl. Due to her father's (Colin Farrell) drinking and declining fortunes, she, her wary but unprotesting mother, and two younger sisters, leave a comfortable home in town for a ramshackle farm in a remote part of Australia. Highly personable and extroverted by nature, her father escapes from reality in flights of fancy that become more elaborate as his drinking worsens. He turns to his eldest daughter for solace--he sees in her a kindred spirit and he tries to instill in her his love of imagination and dreaming. When he collapses while giving a drunken speech at a local fair, the family is thrown into turmoil until a stern but kindly aunt (who provides the template for Mary Poppins) arrives from England to take charge of the family and help them through the crisis. These memories haunt the adult Travers as she tries to come to terms with the current situation, with its similar themes of isolation and financial ruin.
Banks is the latest in what has emerged in recent years as an intriguing sub-genre of “behind-the-scenes” movies, films about the making of beloved films or other works of popular art. The last decade and a half, for instance, has produced My Week with Marilyn (2011), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Finding Neverland (2004), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and Becoming Jane (covering the pre-novel-writing life of Jane Austen, 2007). Accurate or not, most of them have been pretty good films. The creation of entertainment is definitely entertaining. Of course, Hollywood has always loved to gaze at itself in its own mirror—stories about moviemaking are nearly as old as the movies themselves. Call it self-reflexivity but obsessive self-regard is more like it—Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its Narcissus complex.
The film combines two storylines--in the first, the adult Travers (Emma Thompson, in a terrific performance) visits California to work on the script of the proposed movie, and in the second, her difficult childhood on a farm in Australia is unveiled in a series of flashbacks. Travers resisted Disney's overtures to bring her beloved character to the screen for nearly twenty years. But in need of money, she considers signing a contract with the persistent film mogul. The resulting trip to California to meet with Disney and his staff is an unpleasant duty to her, not a promising opportunity, and unsurprisingly is filled with physical and emotional discomforts. Sitting in a cramped airplane seat, she begins to remember another reluctant journey, one she took with her family as a young girl. Due to her father's (Colin Farrell) drinking and declining fortunes, she, her wary but unprotesting mother, and two younger sisters, leave a comfortable home in town for a ramshackle farm in a remote part of Australia. Highly personable and extroverted by nature, her father escapes from reality in flights of fancy that become more elaborate as his drinking worsens. He turns to his eldest daughter for solace--he sees in her a kindred spirit and he tries to instill in her his love of imagination and dreaming. When he collapses while giving a drunken speech at a local fair, the family is thrown into turmoil until a stern but kindly aunt (who provides the template for Mary Poppins) arrives from England to take charge of the family and help them through the crisis. These memories haunt the adult Travers as she tries to come to terms with the current situation, with its similar themes of isolation and financial ruin.
Banks is the latest in what has emerged in recent years as an intriguing sub-genre of “behind-the-scenes” movies, films about the making of beloved films or other works of popular art. The last decade and a half, for instance, has produced My Week with Marilyn (2011), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Finding Neverland (2004), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and Becoming Jane (covering the pre-novel-writing life of Jane Austen, 2007). Accurate or not, most of them have been pretty good films. The creation of entertainment is definitely entertaining. Of course, Hollywood has always loved to gaze at itself in its own mirror—stories about moviemaking are nearly as old as the movies themselves. Call it self-reflexivity but obsessive self-regard is more like it—Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its Narcissus complex.
But Saving Mr. Banks is interested in a different kind of complex.
Not content to tell how it all happened, Banks
delves into why it happened. Its seriousness is a surprise, given the
light-hearted nature of the film behind the film. Perhaps Saving Mr. Banks should be retitled Rescuing Sigmund Freud because Thompson’s Travers suffers from an unresolved Electra Complex the size of
Australia. Underlying her struggles with Disney for control of her "character" lies the conflict in her feelings for her charming but errant father. They've been waiting years to be worked through, and now, despite or because of, the painful encounters with Disney, the healing begins to take place.
The "Mr. Banks" of the title is the patriarch of the family Mary Poppins serves in Travers' novels. In the film, she's appalled that the studio's script has changed her mild-mannered banker into a cold, imperious bank manager who ignores his children and cares only for making money. After battling Disney on this and other critical matters--she objects to the film's being a musical, for starters--he wins her over by making her see that Mr. Banks has to be mean in order for the movie make its point--his transformation into a nice guy is central to the story. In their view, Mary Poppins has come to the Banks house not so much to take charge of the children, Michael and Jane, as to rehabilitate the father and teach how to be a better husband and father. By saving him, the entire family is saved. Through a process of transference, Travers identifies Banks' redemption with her own attempts to reclaim her father, salvaging the memory of his innate goodness and genuine love for his family from the misery of their lives and his failures as a parent.
There's more than one instance of transference going on, however. As it turns out, much of this back story about Travers' father isn't accurate. Travers substituted a romanticized version of her childhood for the equally grim but less dramatic facts. There was no farm in Australia, to begin with--the family lived in the town of Allora, Queensland. Her father was not a handsome Irish rogue dying of dissipation but an Englishman of Irish background who succumbed to influenza at 42. The movie's "real story" behind the making of Mary Poppins is therefore another story, one that Travers herself composed. The “truth” is based on one more piece of her’ fiction, her own about herself, which adds another layer of myth-making to the film.
It also underscores the complicated relationship between Travers and her adapters. In a sense, they're doing to her book what she did to her past--reimagining it--and the distress she feels witnessing the former is perhaps an echo of the distress that led her to do the latter. It's no coincidence, of course, that both of Travers' stories center on her complicated relationship with a commanding male authority figure: collaborating with Walt Disney doesn't just reawaken the memory of her father, it virtually brings him back to life. With his fantastic tales and beguiling ways, her father is the original Walt Disney, and in order to reconcile Travers with her father, Disney in a way becomes him. Wooing her with honeyed words, Hanks' Disney is the successful businessman version of her father--even to the point of having a secret vice. Instead of drinking himself to death, Disney smokes in private, not wanting to tarnish his public image but laying the groundwork for his death from lung cancer a few years later. The "Mr. Banks" of the title is the patriarch of the family Mary Poppins serves in Travers' novels. In the film, she's appalled that the studio's script has changed her mild-mannered banker into a cold, imperious bank manager who ignores his children and cares only for making money. After battling Disney on this and other critical matters--she objects to the film's being a musical, for starters--he wins her over by making her see that Mr. Banks has to be mean in order for the movie make its point--his transformation into a nice guy is central to the story. In their view, Mary Poppins has come to the Banks house not so much to take charge of the children, Michael and Jane, as to rehabilitate the father and teach how to be a better husband and father. By saving him, the entire family is saved. Through a process of transference, Travers identifies Banks' redemption with her own attempts to reclaim her father, salvaging the memory of his innate goodness and genuine love for his family from the misery of their lives and his failures as a parent.
There's more than one instance of transference going on, however. As it turns out, much of this back story about Travers' father isn't accurate. Travers substituted a romanticized version of her childhood for the equally grim but less dramatic facts. There was no farm in Australia, to begin with--the family lived in the town of Allora, Queensland. Her father was not a handsome Irish rogue dying of dissipation but an Englishman of Irish background who succumbed to influenza at 42. The movie's "real story" behind the making of Mary Poppins is therefore another story, one that Travers herself composed. The “truth” is based on one more piece of her’ fiction, her own about herself, which adds another layer of myth-making to the film.
But the parallels don't stop there, for Travers herself is a version of her father, as well as of the fictional counterpart she created for him, Mr. Banks. In fact, she's really more Mr. Banks than her father is, for she's the one who needs "saving." Prim, prickly, and patronizing, as resistant to Disney's brand of fantasy as to the fun of creation collaboration as Mr. Banks is to the charm of his children and Mary Poppins' magic, Travers undergoes a character make-over as crucial to the plot as the flinty banker's is to Mary Poppins. When she finally becomes engaged in the work on that movie, her frosty personality begins to thaw a bit. This is illustrated by the warm relationship she develops with her studio driver, Ralph (Paul Giamatti), a sweet-natured family man who gushes her worship of "Mr. Disney." Listening to Ralph talk adoringly about his handicapped daughter, Travers is drawn toward a feeling of familial love (and unconditional acceptance?) she hasn't experienced since childhood. It's certainly significant that it is while riding with Ralph that Travers comments on the beauty of the Southern California landscape, evoking another memory from her childhood in the similar looking Australian countryside.
At the center of this hall of mirrors, and reflected in every one, is the mythic figure of Walt Disney himself. Fittingly, Saving Mr. Banks saves its nimblest form of salvation for him. Revered by earlier generations, Disney's reputation has taken a beating since his death in 1966, two years after Mary Poppins premiered. Persistent rumors of anti-Semitism and racism, his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunt in Hollywood in the 1950s, and the bizarre (and long since discredited) story about his body being cryonically frozen for future revival have made him seem less than the saintly, avuncular figure he tried so hard to be during his lifetime. Reintroducing him to contemporary audiences as a character in one of his own studio’s movies is a clever way reverse that course—but reanimating him as Tom Hanks, America’s Mr. Nice Guy, is an ingenious bit of image restoration worthy of the Old Master himself.
Not that Hanks’ portrayal is a whitewash. Too sly an actor for that, he makes sure we
remain aware of his earlier screen persona, the cool smart-aleck with the tongue-in-cheek
charm, which still lurks beneath the surface of his more heroic characters. Hanks’ Disney is no idealistic dreamer, he
just loves to talk like one, but continued success seems to have merged sales
pitch and self-image in his head: he acts less frustrated by Travers’ refusal
to compromise on her story than upset by her ability to resist his appeal. Cautious and doggedly courteous, the Great
Man’s patience burns away like a slow fuse (or one of his concealed cigarettes)
faced with Travers’ stubbornness. Hanks’
clever, and wisely understated, performance offers an amusing but admirably
restrained portrait of this consummate showman who expects his celebrated place
in American popular culture to get him what he wants, and isn’t quite prepared
for when it doesn’t.
But this love letter from Disney’s World to itself is
ultimately not about the
man but the vision that gave the world a celebrated film, which might make it seem
above question. (The
one who initially does question it, Travers herself, has all her objections and
misgivings brushed away.) From a construction
point-of-view, it’s appropriate that a film showcasing the glories of the studio’s past fashions its plot around the past of the main character. It’s as if the
movie is saying, just by looking into the past we will find the truth. But uncovering the truth is never a simple
task, which, ironically, the film also demonstrates because it’s not a
straightforward biography but a complex psychological mystery, a riddle about
identity and the interdependence of memory and fact--a problematic relationship at best.
Whether or not such ambiguity was the studio's intention when they green-lighted this project, it's what has resulted, and this inevitably has implications for the story Disney is telling about itself. Any account of an historical event obfuscates as much if not more than it reveals. Telling the "story behind the story" just places another story in front of the original one. It peels nothing back--it adds another layer separating us from the truth. On top of which, the story of Saving Mr. Banks is revealed partially in flashbacks, which form another level of story-telling inside. The premise of film is that this inner story functions as its core of "truth"--the key to the enigma of P. L. Travers' personality and the origin of Mary Poppins. Only It happens to also be fiction, a self--embellished version of the author's childhood. Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware of this, but it doesn't matter. Disney may have told Travers' beloved story his way--but she's having the final say.
Whether or not such ambiguity was the studio's intention when they green-lighted this project, it's what has resulted, and this inevitably has implications for the story Disney is telling about itself. Any account of an historical event obfuscates as much if not more than it reveals. Telling the "story behind the story" just places another story in front of the original one. It peels nothing back--it adds another layer separating us from the truth. On top of which, the story of Saving Mr. Banks is revealed partially in flashbacks, which form another level of story-telling inside. The premise of film is that this inner story functions as its core of "truth"--the key to the enigma of P. L. Travers' personality and the origin of Mary Poppins. Only It happens to also be fiction, a self--embellished version of the author's childhood. Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware of this, but it doesn't matter. Disney may have told Travers' beloved story his way--but she's having the final say.
