We took in Saving Mr. Banks at a matinee a few days ago. Highly contrived, of course, a Disney production depicting the Disney operation and Uncle Walt himself in the sunniest light, as well as simplifying and sanitizing P.L. Travers, from whom the Magic Kingdom, after a lengthy courtship, finally wrested the film rights on terms (it may be said to the notably tightfisted studio’s credit) unprecedentedly favorable to the author. If we stipulate that the story as retold is outrageously, or mouserageously, skewed, it’s still a bit of fun to watch two strong-willed individuals spar over their respective and disparate visions of artistic integrity. I would have preferred more time in 1961 Burbank and rather less in 1906 Bumfuck, Australia. Emma Thompson’s thoroughly satisfying performance calls for her to shed tears at the 1964 premiere of Mary Poppins, and these are represented as cathartic tears as she makes peace with her troubled childhood, whereas contemporary accounts suggest that these were tears of rage at the screen desecration of her novel, although it should be noted that she continued cashing the checks to the end of her long life. Tom Hanks as Walt Disney isn’t anything like as grizzled as the dying mogul was in his early sixties, but as the SF Chronicle’s critic has perceptively put it, “he just leaves us contentedly accepting that if Disney were a lot like Hanks, he'd have acted exactly like that.” I can’t quite endorse the film, because I’m left with the strong sense that there’s some quite egregious dishonesty at its heart, and that if there’s an afterlife P.L. Travers is presently strangling Walt Disney over this whether she had to go upstairs, downstairs, or merely cross from the women’s to the men’s dormitory to do so. I have to allow that I enjoyed it, though.

cordially,