Saving Mr Banks, review

In Saving Mr Banks, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson give us a sugar-coated version of Walt Disney's battle to bring Mary Poppins to the screen, says Robbie Collin
aving Mr. Banks is a Bayeux Tapestry version of history: the truth as stitched together by the victors. Disney has produced a film about the tortuous making of Mary Poppins, one of the great pictures in that studio’s canon, and it presents Walt Disney’s struggle with PL Travers, who wrote the original books, as a kind of Norman Conquest of sweetness and charm — a flooding of songs, jelly-beans and thick Californian sunlight into the life of a brilliant but unhappy writer.

John Lee Hancock’s film unapologetically tells the Disney side of the story, with certain uncomfortable details sent dancing off towards the toy box. The picture ends, for example, with Travers moved beyond words at the Mary Poppins premiere in 1964: we don’t see what actually happened next, which was a testy showdown at the reception afterwards, with the author demanding that Disney remove every last trace of animation from the film before its release. (“Pamela, that ship has sailed,” he told her, before walking off; Travers’s response was to withhold the rights to the rest of her books.)