Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers
“SAVING MR. BANKS” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Dec. 20)
125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
“Saving Mr. Banks” — a serio-comic look at Walt Disney’s tireless courtship of “Mary Poppins” author C. L. Travers — can be viewed either as a charming explanation of how one of the best family films of all time came to be made, or as an infuriating example of corporate self aggrandizement.
While cognizant of the latter, I’ll go with the former.
The latest from director John Lee Hancock (“The Rookie,” “The Blind Side”) is set during Travers’ two-week visit to L.A. in the early 1960s, arranged so that Disney — who more than two decades before had sworn to his wife and daughters that he would bring their favorite heroine of children’s literature to the screen — could coax, canjole and charm the dubious author into signing over the movie rights to her books.
Disney was nothing if not determined. Without authorization he had been working for years on the a screenplay and his in-house tunesmiths — brothers Robert and Richard Sherman — already had written the songs for what would be one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time.
Butler's Cinema Scene 