Saving Mr. Banks (Revisiting Our Fathers)

Today was the anniversary of my father’s passing. My brother texted reminding me that it’s been 15 years! Yes it has. Many memories and stories. They grow fonder as the years go by. At times perhaps, a wee bit of revisionist storytelling. That’s the kind thing to do with fathers.

Okay, that’s a downer way to start an article about a movie. Sorry, but I was initiating the theme of the present film. For you see, it’s all in the title: “Saving Mr. Banks.” The famous actors (Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Ferrell, Paul Giamatti) and the familiar story (the recreating of Mary Poppins onto the Disney screen) easily take our attention away from the title and the point of the
movie.

More than telling us the story of how a great film producer talked an author into trusting him with her prized book, Saving Mr. Banks carefully looks into the heart and memory of a daughter who wishes to shine a kind light on her flawed father. At one telling moment in the movie, Travers tells the Disney team who are trying to bring this story to life in their Disneyesque way, “it's not about the children or Mary Poppins, it's about their father.” A father whose legacy she wants somewhat redeemed.

For a significant part of the film, we are transported back in time to experience a family’s life in early 1900’s Australia. The father is a dreamer and a drunk, and it turns out quite ill. His daughter experiences the manic swings of the father she adores whilst watching him fail as a banker and as a family man. We learn that this is P.L. Travers’ father and that the young daughter in the Australian scenes is Travers herself, the author of Mary Poppins.

Mr. Banks, the father in the Mary Poppins story is also a banker and a rather grumpy one at that. For the moviemakers he fits the bill of the typical Disney “villain.” But Travers wants more than that. The father must be presented in more than a one dimensional way. And behold the door opens wide to the title and the thread that runs through the film. (Even Disney himself repeatedly expresses his wish to be a good father. "A man can never break a promise he makes to his kids, no matter how long it takes," he says. "That's what being a daddy is all about.”) Though Mr. Banks may have been an imperfect detached father, at the end of Mary Poppins he openly loves his children and finds the time for them.

The Travers character, which is played so well by Emma Thompson is tirelessly loyal to her father as she makes sure the Disney film makers honor her memory of him in the telling of her story. And isn’t this what we all do a bit?

I remember that the command, “Honor your father and your mother,” was originally given not to children about minding their parents. It was written to adults regarding their older parents. What better way of following that than remembering them well as time goes on? Saving Mr. Banks tries to do what we all desire, tell the stories of our father in as meaningful and positive and accurate way we can. And who better to do that than Walt Disney?