Saving Mr. Banks

I must admit this was my favorite holiday film during winter break. We just don't get a Disney story, we get the real story about Mary Poppins. The flashback story of the Aussie outback was just as interesting as seeing Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and the boys who were making a 'musical' of Mary Poppins.

Yes, in deed the author of Mary Poppins was a lot to deal with and  Emma Thompson was perfect for the part of P.L. Treavors the mysterious writer who wasn't from London, after all. She'd taken her father's first name as her last name.

And to discover that Colin Ferrel played the part as her real father Treavor Goff made the story all the more interesting.

Jason Schwartzman making the 60's look bright!

Of course, this is a story far darker than you'd ever see anything on Disney. This is a story of the strife that most of us can understand in our own childhoods. P.L. didn't exactly have the best one. But she adored her father and truth be told the best part of Mary Poppins character is the good and fun times she had with her father when she was a child. He was playful and creative. Still in reality, he couldn't hold down a job because of his alcoholism. While on the other hand, it seemed in her stories she didn't think much of her mother played by the wonderful Ruth Wilson who was practically on her own in the outback with three children to tend too.

While many will think the story is based on her hard knoxed aunt played by Rachel Griffiths who does come in the aftermath of her father's death to keep the family together (the woman her father couldn't even stand) is perhaps a presence in P.L. life that would stay with her until the very end. She grew up to be a lot like that woman. A stickler for everything.

As a writer, we want to remember people we've met. And characters have a wonderful way of being a compilation of several different people. After all, we are shades of gray, but hues of pink and blues too.

Really, this was truly a touching film that I feel sure many could relate too.

STORYLINE: When Walt Disney's daughters begged him to make a movie of their favorite book, P.L. Travers' "Mary Poppins," he made them a promise - one that he didn't realize would take 20 years to keep. In his quest to obtain the rights, Walt comes up against a curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer who has absolutely no intention of letting her beloved magical nanny get mauled by the Hollywood machine. But, as the books stop selling and money grows short, Travers reluctantly agrees to go to Los Angeles to hear Disney's plans for the adaptation. For those two short weeks in 1961, Walt Disney pulls out all the stops. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the talented Sherman brothers, Walt launches an all-out onslaught on P.L. Travers, but the prickly author doesn't budge. He soon begins to watch helplessly as Travers becomes increasingly immovable and the rights begin to move further away from his grasp. It is only when he reaches into his own childhood that Walt discovers the ...

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