Film Review: Saving Mr Banks (PG)

Runtime: 125 minutes

LIKE all writers worth the ink, Pamela Lyndon Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, was her own fiercest critic. One might reasonably wonder, then, what she would make of this drama about her tussle with Disney over transferring her literary creation to the screen. Promisingly tart in places, she might pronounce, but ultimately too much Tate & Lyle in the mix.

Saving Mr Banks nevertheless has several saving graces, chief among them supercalifragilisticexpialidocious performances from Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as the English lady of letters who resisted offers from the House of Mouse for decades before taking the cheddar.

John Lee Hancock's picture opens a universe away from both Disney's all-American world and the quaint England usually associated with Poppins and Travers. It is Australia, 1906, a new frontier for many, including the Goff family of which young Helen (later to style herself Pamela) was a member. There is Disney-style sunshine, of course, but the landscape is alien and harsh, the wide spaces big enough to swallow more timid souls. This is a land of opportunity, but only for those strong enough to survive it.

Having left its first clue, the screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith departs for early 1960s London where Travers's adviser is once again putting to her the offer from Mr Disney to place Poppins on the screen. In an unprecedented move after decades of attempts, he has even granted her script approval. Still, Travers is reluctant. What finally convinces her to go on an "exploratory" visit to California is that oldest literary muse, the need for money. "I want to keep my house," she resolves, so off to America she must go.

Hancock (writer-director of The Blind Side and The Alamo) lovingly creates the Burbank of the times, a place still small enough to have a certain charm. This is another frontier waiting to be conquered, and Travers means to do it on her terms. Thompson hits the ground striding as the indomitable Travers. Crisp of diction, elegant of style and curly of hair (like Travers, the perm is quite terrifying), she intends to brook no nonsense from Mr Disney. She will defend her Mary Poppins to the end, bitterly if necessary.

As the drama moves back and forth from America to Australia, we begin to understand what forged this woman, and in particular what bred her determination to protect her literary creation. The Poppins story was far more than business with Travers - it was wholly personal. In a series of flashbacks we see the young family, mum and dad (played by Ruth Wilson and Colin Farrell) set out on what is another fresh start. Though father seems full of fun and ideas there is another, desperately unhappy side to him. Still, the Goffs seem a billion miles away from the pukka Banks family visited by the magical nanny; but are they?

The picture allows this part of the tale to unspool gently. Like the young Pamela, we see the truth emerging bit by bit. As the sunshine begins to dim in Australia, the lights-camera-and-action business is going on as normal in LA. These are the early stages of the process, when Travers sat around a table or in a rehearsal room with the writers and songwriters, going through everything line by line.

Jason Schwartzmann, BJ Novak and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) do a lovely turn as the Sherman brothers and Don DaGradi, the songwriters and one of the writers behind the 1964 film. Some of the best scenes are those which take place around the piano as songs such as Let's Go Fly A Kite come into being. If your feet aren't tapping at this point, see a podiatrist.

This jauntiness becomes more important as the Australian end of the tale continues. But Hancock, director of the equally saccharine-soaked The Blind Side, can never quite surrender his picture to the bleak side and it suffers for it. If matters are in danger of becoming too grim, he will cut away to Walt joshing with his secretarial staff or the comedic cut and thrust between the writers and Travers. There is also a sub-plot to fall back on involving Paul Giamatti as Travers's driver, a man who is as optimistic as she is pessimistic, as prone to dispensing homespun wisdom as she is to firing barbs.

Hanks is his ever reliable self as Uncle Walt. The scenes between Disney and Travers find him twinkling fit to burst, but there is always more to Hanks's character studies than first appears, and so it proves here. His Walt is something of a dreamer, certainly, but he is also a hard-driving businessman to his core. Poppins, though a favourite of his children, is also the deal that keeps getting away, and that won't do.

Mop caps off to Thompson, though, who is an unerring delight as Travers. She is brave enough to make the crusty old dame as brutal and unlikeable as possible to those touchy-feely, first-name-term Americans, so that when the ice melts it means something. If only the rest of the film had kept the same stiff upper lip for longer.