A Few Extra Thoughts...

Explaining Mr. Banks

by Hunter Isham

        Outside of the formal review, I'd like to say that some of the criticism lobbed at Saving Mr. Banks is quite unfair, the most egregious of which is that the Disney Company has created a film to whitewash its own history. Kelly Marcel's screenplay was written for producer Alison Owen without any assistance from or cooperation with Disney, right down to the many Poppins song references woven throughout the film. Once landing on the annual Hollywood Blacklist (the top un-produced screenplays, as voted on by producers and executives), it garnered Disney's attention, and went on to be produced with very few changes. How do I know this? I've read a draft of Saving Mr. Banks written before it was purchased by Disney, and the film that was made is virtually the same as the one on the page from more than two years ago. This is all to say that you can call Banks revisionist history about Disney by Disney, but it was neither commissioned nor destroyed by the corporate machine. The film would never have been made without the company's consent, and given the intellectual property used onscreen, not to mention Walt Disney appearing as a character, that consent would never have been given to an outside entity. Disney can only be blamed for bankrolling the film's production, and marketing it to the masses, but not for writing (or rewriting) it. Saving Mr. Banks is hardly propaganda, but it is a soft-edged version of history that, like most movies, gets some things right and some things wrong, but it's all done in the name of the story. I can't claim that it's a perfect film, but it does what it sets out to do very effectively, and if anyone beside Disney had made this film, the vitriol would likely be minimal, allowing the craft to take center stage. Banks doesn't deify Walt Disney and the people behind the film Mary Poppins, but it shows they had a passion for making a great film, which they ultimately did, but it also makes clear that the film would not be as it is without the input of P.L. Travers.
        The notion of film being revisionist history is a touchy subject in general, but I think both the subject matter and the medium must be taken into account. First of all, a narrative film should first and foremost tell a story, and should that story be a true one, we can only hope that it's told with as much accuracy as possible, but not so much that it's to the detriment of the narrative. The phrase "based on a true story" should be taken seriously, so it should not come as a surprise when a real event portrayed on screen has been altered in someway. A textbook or documentary can be held to a higher standard, and a narrative film can be if claiming to tell the absolute truth, but that is rarely the case. Although I don't recall "based on a true story" being present at the beginning of Saving Mr. Banks, it's present in the marketing campaign, and the film has been sold as no more accurate than any other. I would expect a film like Lincoln to be more meticulously detailed and accurate than Saving Mr. Banks, but ultimately what matters in any story is what it all means. Every film, no matter how arty or trashy, has some kind of theme or purpose, be it as simple as friendship, or as complicated as communicating the vexing qualities of the ever-changing landscape of geopolitics. The fact that Saving Mr. Banks manages to be about more than the events portrayed on screen is commendable. It makes its easily stereotyped characters human and it says something about the creative process. Earlier this year, an independent biopic about Steve Jobs was pounced on for simply being dull. I haven't seen it, but it apparently has no real reason to exist, as it offers the audience nothing new or insightful about its main character. A film must command an audience's attention, otherwise we'd all walk out of the movies asking why we just wasted two hours of our respective lives. When a film rewrites history without lying about it, it hopefully serves the story. I'll trust the audience to be smart enough to figure that out.