Saving Mr. Banks

Who will emerge victorious from the central duel is obvious from the fact that this film was produced by Disney, which used the subject matter for the tacky promotion of its own values and products. All narrative nuances and character attributes are subordinated to the self-glorifying tone of the film. Any information that didn’t fit into the pre-defined boxes for Walt Disney (the ever-smiling, pragmatic-to-the-bone All American man) or P.L. Travers (the strait-laced admirer of Victorian morality) was simply omitted. We thus do not learn from the film that Travers was an unorthodox bisexual devoted to Zen Buddhism and, of course, there is no mention of Disney’s chauvinism and antisemitism. ___ The desperate author’s attempt to sabotage the American premiere of what Disney turned her book into is presented as a humorous episode that not only couldn’t jeopardise the success of the film, which went on to win five Oscars, but also led to the author’s hardly believable awakening. Hancock’s variation on romantic comedies (in which sex is logically absent) gives cynical viewers no other option than to interpret the woman’s tears in the climax as an expression of helplessness over her lost battle with the media conglomerate. I find it particularly perverse when an outwardly heartwarming film for the whole family unashamedly assert that it’s fine for a powerful studio to defile someone’s creative vision for the sake of higher revenues. After all, the result was a film that is still beloved today, so why be angry? ___ Regardless of the unfair distribution of power that, contrary to society’s current mood, leads us to root for the wealthy capitalist, Saving Mr. Banks is not a film that would go awry in any way. The attempt to liven up the interior drama with flashbacks leads to the haphazard use of these jumps in time (memories are not “triggered” by events in the present) as well as to their excessive sentimentality and visual kitsch (which, unlike War Horse, is not a self-conscious reminder of how Technicolor melodramas looked). The search for parallels between real characters (Travers’s parents) and fictional characters (the book’s protagonists) is as forced and would-be revelatory as in the biographical Hitchcock and the whole storyline from the past, which comes across as needless and only slows down the narrative. ___ Emma Thompson’s performance is more stilted than her character requires and Hanks plays such an idealised and instantly lovable version of Disney that you expect animated flowers to start dancing and singing around him. The hollowness of the directing and the acting in the film, which – unlike the film Mary Poppins – can only talk about the power of imagination, culminates in one of the last scenes, in which we are alerted to the author’s miraculous character transformation by the fact that the woman is wearing a dress of warmer colours and sitting in a room flooded with light. The clouds part, the sun comes out after the rain and we can leave the cinema with the feeling that everything is just as Mr. Disney would have wished. 50% (14.02.2014) (vähemmän) (lisää)