A heaping spoonful of saccharine, a barrel of industrial-grade schmaltz, a pinch of vinegar — and ingratiating performances by Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks — go only so far in helping the shameless self-promotion that is “Saving Mr. Banks’’ go down.
Walt Disney was infamous for not only twisting literary works to his own creative ends — hardly unusual in Hollywood — but for aggressively supplanting the originals, even in print, with “the Disney version.’’
His artistic heirs have upped the ante with this glorified infomercial, celebrating his strong-arming of author P.L. Travers into letting him film “Mary Poppins’’ his way and at the same time aggressively congratulating Uncle Walt for doing her (and the world) a huge favor.
“It’s what we storytellers do: We restore order with imagination,’’ Hanks’ Disney tells Thompson’s Pamela Travers in the film’s most risible scene. He cajoles her into accepting that the only way she’ll come to come to terms with her troubled childhood in Australia is by sharing his version of “Mary Poppins’’ with the world.
In interminable and awkwardly staged flashbacks, a terrible Colin Farrell plays Travers’ beloved father, a whimsical but irresponsible bank clerk whose prodigious alcoholic consumption reduces the family to genteel poverty at the very end of the railroad line.
Director John Lee Hancock (“The Alamo’’) wrings more entertainment value out of the 60ish Travers’ arrival in 1961 Hollywood, when the Englishwoman’s strained financial straits forces her to finally entertain Disney’ s two decades of attempts to purchase “Mary Poppins.’’ (Paul Giamatti is thanklessly cast as her chauffeur with a handicapped daughter).
Travers refuses to sign over the rights unless Disney grants her creative control — but the avuncular and ruthless studio head and his team steamroller all of her many objections, including the use of animation, songs, flying, the casting of Dick Van Dyke and the color red.
Neither the “Mary Poppins” stars nor its director (Robert Stevenson) are meaningfully depicted in what amounts to film about the movie’s pre-production rather than its actual making. The creative team is represented by writer Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Richard and Robert Sherman (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak, respectively), who perform a good portion of the “Mary Poppins’’ score for the mostly horrified Travers (Thompson is great, by the way).
She’s ultimately less concerned about protecting the integrity of Mary Poppins — loosely inspired by an aunt briefly played in the flashbacks by Rachel Griffiths — than the prospect of building up the subsidiary character of Mr. Banks, who’s based on her father.
In the Disneyfied happy ending, we’re led to believe she’s weeping tears of happiness at the premiere of “Mary Poppins.’’ In fact, she spent the rest of her long life badmouthing the movie, refusing to authorize a sequel — and, in her 90s, granting stage rights only on the express condition that no Americans were involved.
Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person, whose unseen chain-smoking led to his death of cancer five years later. Forcing Travers to take a tour of Disneyland, he’s a master salesman — and “Saving Mr. Banks’’ is ultimately much less about magic than making the sale, in more ways than one.