So who would have suspected that a whole heap of unresolved Daddy/daughter issues lay beneath the shiny, happy surface of … Mary Poppins? That’s the case put forward in John Lee Hancock’s funny, touching and surprisingly beguiling Saving Mr. Banks (the Closing Night film of this year’s London Film Festival) which dramatises the conflicts that arose from Walt Disney’s determination to bring P.L.Travers’s books to the cinema screen in a (now beloved) all-singin’, all-dancin’ form.
Hancock’s frankly Freudian take on these events pits its avuncular, wily Disney (Tom Hanks) against a prim, schoolmarmish, control freak Mrs. T. (Emma Thompson) as the Mouse man flies the fiercely reluctant - but cash-strapped - author out to Hollywood and tries to woo her for once and for all into signing over the rights to the Poppins books. Interspersed with these 1960s scenes - which find Travers wrangling with Disney and his creative team over the movie’s script, design, characterisation and casting (“Dick van Dyke is not one of the greats!” she protests) - are flashbacks to the writer’s childhood in turn-of-the-century Australia. Here, as the movie tells it, Travers’s early life with her eccentric, alcoholic pa (Colin Farrell) and put-upon mother (Ruth Wilson) sowed the seeds for her future literary creations.
Hancock made a botch of his previous outing The Blind Side but, working from an astute, affectionate script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, he gets the tone right in this new film, producing a movie about movie-making that avoids the various pitfalls of archness, cynicism or cosy self-adoration. That Saving Mr. Banks is a Walt Disney Production should alert you to the fact that the film isn’t the place to go to for a blistering critique of the Mouse House. Sure, Thompson’s Travers gets to whip out caustic denunciations of the Disney Empire as a crass, vulgarising, “dollar-printing machine” but Walt’s perspective that the work that both he and Travers does as storytellers “instils hope [in audiences] time and again” is finally the view that dominates.
Still, the film’s presentation of the pair’s interaction and the workings of the Disney studio proves nuanced enough. Starting out as nicely-done culture-clash comedy (“It smells like chlorine. And sweat” is Travers’s verdict on L.A. when she steps from the plane), the film digs deeper as it goes along, its points about adaptation and authorship developing in a great series of script-meeting scenes that find Travers’s tart, unforgiving personality testing the patience of toothy American geniality as represented by Mary Poppins’s screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and its composers the Sherman Brothers (Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak).
At the heart of the picture is a platonic male/female double act to place alongside the one in Philomena. But Hancock’s movie rings a whole lot richer and truer than Frears’s does; it’s actually made with some genuine feeling and sensibility. It also helps that, unlike Philomena, Saving Mr Banks feels thoroughly inhabited by other vivid, well-drawn characters – each of whom makes you grin a little every time they appear and who complement Hanks and Thompson’s well-judged turns in the lead roles. Hanks makes his twinkling Disney a man who knows that charm’s the best way to get what he wants, while Thompson (the spirit of Nanny McPhee constantly hovering) uses her crack comedy timing to cut through some of the movie’s more manipulative bits. The moment when her Travers charges into the boss’s office bellowing “Disney!” in scary low tones suggests a sensational Lady Bracknell in the actress’s future.
Throughout, Hancock proves himself adept at bringing out understated, intimate moments, especially in the scenes that show Travers’s loneliness and disorientation in L.A. and how those feelings pull her back into sometimes painful memories of her past. (The film’s flashback structure and literary-creation themes mark it out as a companion piece to Gavin Millar’s quirkier, Dennis Potter-scripted Dreamchild.) The Australia-set scenes initially look a tad too whimsical but they gain in grit, helped by Colin Farrell’s best screen performance in ages and the piercingly plaintive notes that Ruth Wilson strikes as Travers’s mother, a woman rendered increasingly desperate by her husband’s wayward actions.
Saving Mr. Banks has some shortcomings: in particular, the over-extended ending, set at the Poppins premiere, is fumbled. Elsewhere, though, scenes that, by rights, shouldn’t work come off: witness Travers’s tentative bonding with her sweet chauffeur (Paul Giamatti). Mostly, the film is lovely, and its centrepiece sequence - in which the frosty Travers finally thaws out when introduced to the delights of “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” - is as purely joyous a moment as 2013’s movies have offered.
Saving Mr Banks opens in the UK on 29th November.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Theatre Review: Anna Christie (Donmar Warehouse)
With its sometimes creaky plotting and quaint attempts at rendering “ethnic” dialect (we hear way too much about “Dat ole davil, da sea”), it’s fair to say that Anna Christie (1920) isn’t the Eugene O’Neill play that’s aged the best. But Rob Ashford’s accomplished, atmospheric new production, which opened last week at the Donmar Warehouse, manages to transcend most of the play’s shortcomings, and achieves moments of genuine beauty and poetic intensity. O’Neill’s tale of a young prostitute’s reunion with the sea-captain father who abandoned her to a life of drudgery (and worse) with family members on a farm is most notable for its sympathetic characterisation of its female protagonist. While the other characters are broadly drawn to the point of caricature, O’Neill constructs Anna in more than one-dimension. Tough yet vulnerable, perceptive and intelligent, variously bitter and resigned, she’s a great American heroine.
And while physically not quite the “handsome, large, Viking-daughter” of O’Neill’s specification, Ruth Wilson comes through with a stunning performance here, creating a riveting portrait of a woman bruised by her experiences and seeking rest and redemption. The pivotal scene in which she reveals the truth of her past to the two men who both seek to control her is this production’s deeply affecting highlight.
The male roles are less distinguished but both actors deliver committed performances. Laying heavily into an Oirish brogue but moderating the excessive gesticulating that very slightly marred his Hamlet for me, a toned Jude Law brings great physicality and some witty touches to his role as Burke, the stoker who falls for Anna; his first scene seems destined to become a classic, on several counts. And as Anna’s father, David Hayman starts out rather over-effusively but finds a few touching grace notes in the role as the evening progresses.
The production design is also noteworthy: Paul Wills contributes a wonderful set (the Act 1 to Act 2 transition from saloon bar to barge’s stern is thrilling) and an understated, shanty-influenced score from Adam Cork also adds to the atmosphere. O’Neill’s play is stuck with some dated and problematic aspects but this is a fine, eloquent staging that frequently touches the soul.
The production runs for 2 hours 30 minutes and is booking until 8th October. Further information here. Warning: contains STRONG accents.
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