Imagine - SAVING MR BANKS

On the 1st day of this new year, after the famous concert in Vienna, I watched "Mary Poppins", a film which is usually broadcast during Christmas holidays.

It has become a kind of tradition and, in case I would miss it for some reasons, I have also bought the DVD, so that I can watch it anyway.

I was interested in another film, connected with "Mary Poppins", which I couldn't watch when it came out in 2013: "Saving Mr. Banks", directed by John Lee Hancock and performed by Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks and Colin  Farrell.

You can read here all the informations you may need.

The actors are excellent and they manage to create a realistic atmosphere, especially if we focus on the relationship between Walt Disney and Pamela Travers.

They seem very different: Walt is the personification of cheerfulness, he has a positive attitude in every occasion, his collaborators are a part of his family and not just anonymous subordinates.
Pamela, instead, is very hostile and overcritical about the Walt's staff and, especially, about their idea of how to realize the "Mary Poppins" film.

The story itself is well written, so we can see the psychological struggle of Pamela, thank to the flashbacks of her childhood which show a different girl.

A little girl who idealised her father, who was the one who teaches her how to dream and to evade from an oppressive reality.

But he is a victim of that reality, a victim of alcohol, the only thing that can make him forget about  the weight of his hated job at the bank and daily routine.

Walt and Pamela both share a sad past and sad memories to fight against, but, as Walt explains to her, we don't have to remember only the tragic moments.

There is a scene in which he gets drunk before his speech during a festival in the town where the family lives. Pamela reminds this event when the Sherman brothers plays the song of the bank in which Mr Banks works. I think that this is why she hates the idea of a musical.

At the end she undersands that songs are not the real problem, but the distance between her father and herself, between Mr Banks and his children. There is a moment in which Pamela and the children of Mr Banks think their father doesn't care about them and they have been abandoned.

That's why she had created Mary Poppins, someone who can show the power of imagination once again, which can connect people and help others to forget about the problems for a while.

And this is summarised by Mary Poppins's "Kite song": the balance between duty and pleasure, job and family,  trying to be always themselves.

It is a dense film which opens out softly and involves the public in the same feelings of the protagonist (I even cried when she cried and I don't get emotional so easily).

"That's what we storytellers do.

We restore order with imagination.

We instill hope again and again and again"

Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) 

Yours, Silvia