‘Saving Mr. Banks’ Hates Its Lead Character

At one point in Saving Mr. Banks, author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) looks at what writers from Walt Disney Studios have done to one of her characters and asks why they’ve made him so terrible. Watching this film, I wondered the same thing about its treatment of Travers. I can’t recall the last time a movie worked so hard to make me dislike its own protagonist. Travers is the villain of her own story, since she is standing in the way of Mary Poppins getting made. But if you do not hold that film in any special nostalgic regard, then you’re likely to sympathize more with the whimsy-allergic Travers than the aggressively chipper Walt Disney (Tom Hanks).

The year is 1961, and after two decades of cajoling, Disney has finally worn Travers down enough for her to consider selling him the film rights to her novel Mary Poppins. But first, she’ll be paying a visit to the studio to see just what the man and his cronies have in store for her beloved creation. Travers is aghast at the Sherman brothers’ (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak) fluffy songs, at the idea of Dick van Dyke playing one of her characters, at Mr. Banks written as a man who would rip up his children’s drawings, at everything really. But Disney, being of godlike magical cunning, knows how to chip away at her many defenses. In flashback, we see Travers’s early childhood in Australia, and how her experiences with her creative but drunken father (Colin Farrell) made her the person she is today.

Emma Thompson should win some kind of special award for doing her best to make the most thankless role of the year her own. But even she cannot overcome the nastiness of this character, nor the clear contempt the film has for her. She treats “the help” badly, she hates children even though she writes books for them, and she is repulsed by every element of the Mary Poppins film that is now deemed to make it a classic. Her arc comes in learning to loosen up and embrace the magic, abetted by Walt Disney’s canny psychological insight.

The portrayal of Disney in this film fascinates me in a morbid way. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Hanks was purposefully injecting just a hint of the sinister into his performance. He holds on to hands too long, lets quiet pauses hang in the air, puts out enough details that make him feel “off.” This is especially pronounced in combination with the near-Orwellian optimism enforced on the grounds of his studio. His employees call him by his first name with the clear implication that there will be unpleasantness if they are too formal. There’s a moment near the end of the film, in which Disney unexpectedly appears on Travers’s doorstep, which easily could have come out of a horror movie. But this effect is mostly unintentional, a case of the film badly misjudging the viewer’s allegiance to the myth of Disney.

As I have made clear before, I don’t care much about how faithfully movies based on real events stick to the facts. But in this case, the fact that history has not just been tweaked but rewritten wholesale, on an Inglorious Basterds level, disturbs me. Perhaps it is because here it is a corporate entity working over its own past. It’s not enough that Disney’s films sell audiences a soft sugar vision of the world – the studio’s background must be squeaky clean as well. Disney was not a quasi-Christ of imagination – more a quasi-fascist. P.L. Travers was not a hateful biddy – rather, a quite interesting woman.

But really, Saving Mr. Banks could have depicted Travers as the avatar of Cthulhu and Disney as Hitler’s assassin, and I wouldn’t have cared as long as it was still good. But all of this is in the service of a woefully flat story that takes a dim, airport self help book view of psychology and how art helps people process their pain. Travers’s Australia backstory gives us obvious “origins” for each of her modern day neuroses in insultingly pat ways. She hates pears because she bought her father some on the day he died. She hates Los Angeles because the heat reminds her of her childhood home. So on and so forth.

That leads to the biggest eye-roller of them all. It eventually becomes clear that Travers dislikes Disney because he reminds her of her father, who was also a consummate storyteller. Thus does Disney become a paternal figure for her, just as he supposedly is to us all. He uses his power as a filmmaker to help Travers finally work through her lingering grief over her father’s death. In this way, the movie undercuts its own message, since its evident that channeling her pain into her books didn’t help her get over things. All falls away before the might of Disney.

The scene that best represents Saving Mr. Banks sees the Sherman brothers showcase “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” for Travers. Up til now, she has completely resisted all attempts to charm her, but this song wins her over. And it’s not just the moment of the tiny breakthrough, either – she gets up and dances and sings with them. But why? I cannot tell. There has been no indication that her resolve has been cracking. Apparently, the song is just that uplifting. And you are meant to agree with that sentiment, to be caught up in a nostalgic thrall for Mary Poppins. This is Disney wielding its cultural influence as an emotional cattle prod. But I have no love for that film, and so I am having none of this. Team Travers all the way.

Grade: D