Saving Ms. Banks

Spoiler alert: a few plot twists revealed here.

My wife and I took two young ones to watch Saving Mr. Banks a few days ago. Boy, was that a mistake. The movie was totally inappropriate for children. It is, through and through, an adult film. I wouldn't even particularly want my older two kids to have seen it.

That said, I thought it was a wonderful movie. Just sad we dragged our kids through it.

In the movie, we watched P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins) go back and forth with the folks at Disney over whether and how the book would be presented on screen.

The movie takes its title from the idea that the author (at first subconsciously, then more overtly) was trying to save her father's memory. In short, she wanted, if only in the movie, a happy ending for her father.

The author's real father died when she was young. He was apparently a washed up alcoholic demoted from bank manager to bank clerk before influenza brought his life to an early end.

Redeeming the memory of Mr. Banks will take hard work.

That work paid off, however, as we all remember Mr. Banks as a man who came around. He goes and flies a kite with his kids, and gets his job back to boot.

After seeing movies like these, I tend to head off to Wikipedia to get a glimpse of the real story behind what I saw on screen.

It was a sobering read.

The movie present P. L. Travers as a very difficult woman, to be sure. But it also showed her coming around. Getting softer. Connecting with her limo driver.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a very sanitized version of what really happened. The author appears to have been every bit as difficult as the movie implied.

Minus the redemptive parts.

The whole story is in Wikipedia, but suffice to say that the article ends with this chilling comment: "According to her grandchildren, Travers died loving no one and with no one loving her."

If Mary Poppins is (on a deeper level) about saving Mr. Banks, then it must also be said that Saving Mr. Banks is really about saving "Ms. Banks".

For me, that's sad on two levels.

Firstly, it makes the movie less meaningful to me. Fiction has its place in our lives. But something is lost when a story you hoped was true turns out to be... well.... so much fiction.

It's even more sad on a second level. I now grieve for P. L. Travers.

She was a real person.

And she never actually got saved.