Saving Mr. Banks Showing the adult side of Mary Poppins

            I saw the preview for Saving Mr. Banks in the theater and I immediately started counting the days till it would come out. Which is why I am so happy that I loved the movie. It was happy, it was sad, it was funny, and it was refreshing for there to be no love story involved in it. It was just a lovely retelling of true events that took place so long ago.

            Mrs. P. L. Travers, Emma Thompson, created the lovely Mary Poppins, and now after twenty years of asking Mrs. Travers has agreed to meet with Walt Disney, Tom Hanks, about making a movie. But Walt will have to go through great lengths to please the uneasy writer.

            This movie is a beautiful and accurate telling of what Walt Disney went through to get the rights to Mary Poppins, but that’s not the only story being told. Through the use of flash backs director John Lee Hancock also tells the story of how Mrs. Travers got the inspiration to write Mary Poppins and it’s not the happy story you’d think it to be. The flash backs seem to coincide well with the movie except for one time. When Mrs. Travers sees the pears and promptly throws them out the window they don’t show hint of why she did this until about thirty minutes later and even then you don’t get the whole meaning behind it till almost the end of the movie. One thing I think is cool to see is the making of the songs that we, the viewers, already know so well. You get to see them figuring out the words and tunes and at the same time trying to get Mrs. Travers to sign off on them. My favorite song to see the making of was the song in the bank. You get to see how much of what is in the song relates directly to Mrs. Travers past. The thing that confuses me about this movie is what they were allowed to put in and not put in because it was a Disney film. Tom Hanks insisted they show Mr. Disney’s smoking habit, but because it was a Disney film the only way it made it in was to see Hanks putting a cigarette out as Mrs. Travers barged into his office. However, all through the movie they show people consuming alcohol. This confuses me because yes smoking is bad, but isn’t drinking a bad thing to show to a younger crowd too? Also, people have said that it is great how Hanks did all the little things that Mr. Disney used to do, like clearing his throat before entering a room to sort of announce himself. But he wasn’t consistent with this. There were a couple scenes where he just walked into the room silently. Then again, though, he could have been trying to just not interrupt what was going on at the time. I thought at first that maybe this movie should have come out sooner since Mary Poppins was released in 1964, but then it wouldn’t have had the great actors that really helped to make this a great movie. So you could say that it came out at just the right time. Over all the good about this movie far outweighs any complaints about it. So if you’ve seen Mary Poppins but not Saving Mr. Banks you are really missing out on a lot of good stuff. You definitely need to see this movie.

 

If you're curious about this movie come check out the preview here.
Also be on the look out for my next review. As always here's a little taste of Carjacked.

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