Thursday, January 2, 2014

But I feel what's to happen, all happened before.

Saving Mr. Banks - 6/10
P.L. Travers is a terrible person, and so they made a movie about her. Her interference in the making of the movie is great – when it's about the creative process and the compromises (for good and ill) that go into letting go of your vision (and the manipulation that goes into letting certain things pass through), the movie hits a certain stride. But looking at it from her perspective doesn't do it justice – she reaches no epiphany of herself, in present day or flashback. Someone (Walt) has to look from the outside to outright speak things. It should've been told from his (or the other writers) perspectives all along, because that's the only time we get any real introspection (or any likable characters). How To Understand Someone You Cannot Possibly Know. She was a thing to be solved (and then they just ignored her anyway). It would have also served to make her more sympathetic, because let's be honest: she gets fucked over. There was a more interesting story to tell here, outside of the Disneyfication of things. SIDENOTE: For the first few flashbacks, I thought the movie was about what happened after Mary Poppins ended – a banker leaves his job to chase whimsy, only to become a hopeless drunk. Which was fun, to think that. 

No comments: