As a child, her alcoholic father (handsome Colin Farrell)lavishes her specially with his playfulness and attention, emotionally seducing her as he continues to fail his wife and family. The reality of his betrayal and death cripples every dimension of her personality and experience.
Walt Disney, played by Tom Hanks, has made it a mission to secure her novel for the screen, and Mrs.Travers, uptight, fearful, English spinster short of money, goes to Hollywood to collaborate on the screenplay.
She is finally beguiled once again, after working with Disney and his talented lyricist and composer, and permits the movie to be made. We see her on opening night at the premiere, as she experiences a redemptive closure on her past.
It's the realization that those wonderful songs from Mary Poppins that we all love still: " …the medicine goes down, the medicine goes down…", "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"…"let's go fly a kite" - what it they'd never been written and brought to the screen, a loss we'd never even know we'd suffered.
Hanks makes a fine Disney, a seductive salesman, smooth, insistent, persuasive. His pitch to her makes a powerful case for the necessity of vicarious fantasy, because without it, life would be unutterably painful and tragic.
It's astonishing to me how Disney owns the childhood imaginations of several generations of American children, including myself. Then Disney himself is another story, and I think Tom Hanks is superb at creating the character.
The Disney-paradigm, however, is for me a limiting narrow world stylistically. Visually, as beautiful as the films are, there is a dreadful similarity in them that trouble me. The flatness, the outlines, the relentless manipulative narratives, homogenize the multiple narrative sources, making of them gelid hybrids of their actual narrative strengths. I wouldn't be without them but I'm glad I'm free of them, though it's taken me a long time to move out.
Critics found the film sappy and sentimental, and so it was, but the parallel experience of Travers,once again being charmed by a special man, whose power to dominate narrative was enormous, to me was actually quite creepy at times. No wonder she was so troubled by giving over her own narrative to be "re-purposed", even though it was done very well.
The screenplay really doesn't follow the actual events: Disney already owned the rights to Mary Poppins when she went to Hollywood to collaborate, and he never played a major role in convincing her to sell them.
She cried at the opening, not because of a cathartic experience, but because she disliked it, especially the animated penguin sequence. She wanted it removed from the finished film and Walt refused: "that ship has sailed",he told her at the party after the premiere.
Evidently the actual P.L.n Travers was even more unpleasant and cantankerous than portrayed in the film, with quite a dark side. She wasn't an "old maid", but was bi-sexual.
Slated to adopt Irish twins, she took only one, refusing to take his brother - how callous. Did she go to the Magdalen Sisters to adopt? Overlapping stories here. Her son Camillus, never knew he was adopted until as a young adult he met his twin in a bar and found out the truth. Now there's the movie I'd like to see,a kind of reverse Philomena.
A very Hollywood movie, all in all.
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