Saving Mr. Banks

I couldn't get a ticket for the preview of this at the cinema in Soho, as it was fully booked.   The next nearest venue was the Odeon Kingston, which I worked out I could just about get to providing I got away from work on time, by getting the Northern line to Euston, then the Victoria line to Vauxhall and finally Southern Rail to Kingston.   Fortunately, I got all my connections, and as the cinema is just across the road from the station, I was there on time - they don't let latecomers into previews, and if you get there at the last moment, you often have to sit in a very poor seat at the side.    Luckily, I was there in time to get a really good seat looking straight at the screen.

Saving Mr. Banks is about Walt Disney's negotiations with author P.L.Travers in connection with making a film of her book, Mary Poppins.    With Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, and Emma Thompson as P.L.Travers, the two headstrong characters fight it out every inch of the way; Walt Disney is determined to make the film, but P.L.Travers has her own ideas about her book, and is equally determined to have her own way.   She must have been a nightmare to work with, but at the same time, Mary Poppins was very precious to her, not least because it is, in many ways, not just a story but part of her own story.   The Mr. Banks of the title is in fact her father, whose reputation she is determined to maintain.

Although I'm sure the film exercised a great deal of poetic licence, it was well-made and well scripted - the characters seemed real, even if very cantankerous and impossible to work with.    Only those such as the two scriptwriters and her driver were really nice characters.

Much of the film consists of flashbacks to P.L.Travers's childhood in Queensland, where she lived in a house miles from anywhere - one wonders how her father, a bank manager, got to work every day, since the house seemed to be a very long way from the town.   She idolised her father, an alcoholic who died, in the film from TB, while she was still quite young.    It took a while before I realised that these were flashbacks, rather than a parallel story.

I've now added Mary Poppins to my list of books to read - the list is rather long, so I don't know when I will eventually get round to reading it.