Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross: If you don’t enjoy Saving Mr Banks, there’s something wrong with you

Still, perhaps it didn't need quite so many spoonfuls of sugar

Disney Enterprises, Inc
Saving Mr Banks tells ‘the untold true story’ of the making of the Disney classic Mary Poppins via the stand-offs between Walt and the book’s author, P.L. Travers, and it is not a taxing film. You always know where it’s going and, with its rather melodramatic flashbacks, there is no ambiguity as to where it is coming from, but neither matters as much as they should as there is just so much joy to be had otherwise. It stars both Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson (you spoil us, ambassador!), is smartly and deftly directed (by John Lee Hancock) and if you can’t get off on the composers, the Sherman brothers, sitting at the piano and coming up with ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’ or ‘Spoonful of Sugar’ there is something seriously wrong with you, and you possibly need a doctor’s appointment. Also, if you stay until the end of the credits, you will hear something that will give you goose bumps. I can’t, alas, say what it is, because that would be a ‘spoiler’, and you can get ten years for spoilers these days, plus I will be expelled from the Critics’ Circle. (I’m not even a member of the Critics’ Circle, so imagine the shame of being expelled before I’d even been invited to join!)

On the whole, the film goes down in the most delightful way

SAVING MR. BANKS

We kick off in the early 1960s, by which time Travers (Thompson) had already been courted by Walt (Hanks) for 20 years but had always refused to sell him the film rights to her book on the grounds he would turn Mary into something ‘all cavorting and twinkling’. (She had a point. The book is actually rather dark and cruel, with no dancing penguins, although this isn’t to say the resultant film wasn’t a masterpiece.

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