"Saving Mr. Banks" - a meditation on Hollywood and historicity

Saving Mr. Banks is one of the big movie hits of the season. After barely a month in release, it earned more than $20 million domestically, and as of Friday was closing on $60 million. Most of the critics have approved, as well -- some calling it a film that’s impossible to dislike. Its U.S. box office receipts make it Disney’s most profitable movie of the past 45 years other than The Lion King and Aladdin.

It purports to tell the story of P.L. Travers, Walt Disney, and how a fictional character named Mary Poppins was created by the one and recreated in a hit 1964 movie musical by the other.

It’s also not entirely truthful.

Now, I hate to come off like a fundamentalist picketing Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I haven’t seen Saving Mr. Banks, and I don’t plan to -- more because it’s not the kind of movie I would spend my meager entertainment budget on than due to a stout ideological objection.

Obviously, I have to depend on other people’s reports about what it contains. I’m certainly not going to urge a boycott, which would be about as effective as trying to keep the front walk dry in a rainstorm with a roll of paper towels.

However, because so many of my Facebook friends are raving about it (“Everybody wept!”), I would like to urge a thought exercise. This is an opportunity to mull over the morality -- or maybe that should be the ethics (or etiquette?) -- of remaking history.

Here are the facts. P.L. Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia, emigrated to England at age 25, and subsequently published a series of children’s novels about a nanny named Mary Poppins. Very much inspired by J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, Travers gave her character magical powers and described her adventures through a series of eight books. Poppins is vain, rather selfish, and a stern disciplinarian who scolds children constantly, especially when they talk about her magic deeds.

Walt Disney’s two daughters were among the many fans of the books, and they begged their father to make a movie about her. Disney first tried to buy the rights in 1938, but at that point his studio was known only for animated films, and Travers didn’t want that.

It took Disney 16 years of serious pleading and negotiations to get Travers to release the rights and get the film made. The author was suspicious that Disney might try to slip animation in the movie, and she feared the Disney corporation would “pretty up” and sentimentalize her creation. She was right on both counts.

Travers was not even invited to the film premiere of Mary Poppins, which suggests the Disney people were well aware of how she’d react. She went anyway, and she cried. Reportedly, when she asked Walt Disney about removing the animated sequence, he responded, “Pamela, that ship has sailed,” and walked away.

Travers was so outraged by the movie that she would not allow the company to make any further films that used her character, and her last will and testament stated that no future stage musicals could include the Sherman Brothers’ songs or anyone else involved in the original film production. Only English writers could be considered for potential approval.

Some commentators have suggested that Mr. Banks is unfair to Travers. And it should be no surprise that they also argue it sugarcoats Walt Disney. His smoking, drinking, and swearing, for example, are soft-pedaled. But we shouldn’t just nod our heads cynically and agree that of course a Disney-made film would probably make its founder look better than he was.

To some extent even the corporation was caught in a bind here, because the script was originally developed by outsiders. An Australian producer named Ian Collie persuaded BBC Films to finance the writing of a biopic of Travers, written by Sue Smith and Kelly Marcel.

Eventually, the script settled on the difficult business relationship of Travers and Walt Disney for its conflict. Someone else might have made it, Disney executives have argued. On the other hand, it’s highly unlikely the film could have been made by any other company, since the story contains so much intellectual property that belongs to the Disney corporation so it would have to approve.

Marcel and Smith believe they have told a plausible and fair story about the author. From her troubled childhood (like the Mr. Banks of her stories, her father was a bank manager, but a failed one who abused alcohol and was demoted to a clerk) to the thorny discussions with the Disney people about the proposed movie, Mr. Banks implies the author’s personal investment in her characters was so deep that she couldn’t let go of them.

In this story, she is partly won over by the rousing Sherman Brothers’ song “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” (which was apparently not the case). And Walt Disney finally persuades her by sharing his own troubled past. Could it have happened? Possibly. One could call it a pat psychological solution made up by the writers, or an illustration of how far a businessman will go to close a lucrative deal. But LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson claims Walt Disney stayed out of LA while Travers worked with the filmmakers.

The difficulty posed by Mr. Banks is heightened by the fact that Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star as Travers and Disney. Within the parameters of the assignments they were handed, their work is apparently brilliant. There’s Oscar buzz.

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Thompson and Hanks acknowledge some of the more unpleasant aspects of the story: Travers’ prickliness and possibly caving in because she was short of money, and Disney’s almost unstoppable charm as well as his brick-wall response to Travers once he’d gotten what he wanted from her. Hanks also reportedly lobbied the studio to at least mention Disney’s smoking habit, so his character is shown stubbing out a cigarette at one point.

Travers is indeed shown weeping at the premiere of Mary Poppins, but viewers have disagreed about whether that’s a sign of disappointment or liberating catharsis.

Perhaps it’s not a big deal that how a fictional character was brought to the screen and came to be beloved by millions was a betrayal of its creator’s intent. But movies regularly serve up false details about serious history, as well, from Argo to Lincoln, and too many people take them for the truth.

If moviegoers could enjoy films as stories in themselves and at least reserved judgment about their accuracy -- and better, went on to investigate the truth on their own -- it wouldn’t be so bad. But I’m afraid that a prettified and false understanding of history tends to encourage uninformed and civic values and voting behavior.

Nicholson’s review of Saving Mr. Banks (titled “Saving Mr. Banks is a Corporate, Borderline-Sexist Spoonful of Lies”!) is one of the chilliest. Travers was a fascinating woman, the critic observes, and a great movie could be made about her, but this isn’t it. “There’s something sour in a movie that roots against a woman who asserted her artistic control,” Nicholson says.

Especially if it transforms a giant corporation that has the money and lawyers to defend its intellectual property rights -- and does so, fiercely; the company has typically filed roughly 200 trademark and copyright lawsuits per year -- into a warm and cuddly protector of the consumer’s best interests. It’s easy for Saving Mr. Banks to peddle the notion that Hollywood always means well, and writers shouldn’t fight its efforts to do whatever it will with their creations. Too easy.