Saving Mr. Banks (2013) Review

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – otherwise known as back in January in my post on new-to-me movies of 2023 – I mentioned that I wanted to do a review of Saving Mr. Banks. Since it has now been close to six months since I said that (not to mention the additional however-many-months since I actually watched the movie), perhaps it’s finally time.

First things first: spoilers will definitely be spilt.

I went into Saving Mr. Banks with high expectations. As mentioned in the aforementioned post, I had read and been highly impressed with Amy Dashwood’s review of this movie. (Completely apart from the movie per se, that was one well-written review.)

Somehow (despite the fact that, completely through my own fault, I had most of the movie given away for me before I watched it) I hadn’t known that the flashbacks to P.L. Travers’ childhood would be an ongoing thing throughout the whole movie. I thought we’d have a big chunk of cheerful-bit-set-in-the-’60s, then a chunk of depressing-bit-set-in-the-1910s, then back to the ’60s for the rest of the movie. I didn’t much like the fact that we kept going back and forth between the two times for the whole movie. It lent a depressing tone to everything.

Of course a rather Irritating tone was lent to everything anyway, due to P.L. Travers herself (whom I shall call Pamela because it’s easier, but let the records show that I don’t think of her as Pamela. Every time I say Pamela, you can picture me thinking P.L. Travers. Except that constantly writing Pamela is probably going to make me start thinking it…so just ignore this whole ridiculous long side-note). Not that one doesn’t feel sorry for her, because one does. But that doesn’t change the fact that she was a cactus in human form. Because really, I put it to you, who but a c. in h. f. would snap at someone as sweet as Ralph?

(Speaking of whom, Ralph was indubitably the best character in the movie. Not even a question there. (The Sherman brothers would probably come in second, despite the fact that I could never remember which was which.))

Of course, the audience is meant to feel more sympathy for Pamela than we see the people around her feeling, because we get to see her traumatic childhood. And here is where I shall start discussing the Themes, and why I don’t think they worked here.

The undercurrent running through the entire story is Pamela’s feeling for her father, and the effect that her childhood has had on her throughout her life. Before I actually saw the movie, I thought that the main conflict in the movie would be Pamela’s resentment toward her father, and her need to forgive him. And I thought that Mr. Banks’ redemption would be the thing that would allow her to do that…that in Mr. Banks’ redemption she would be able to see her own father’s redemption; the story of movie-Mary Poppins would “fix” her own life and finally let her feel closure on that whole dreadful part of her own story.

And I suppose that’s sort of what we got? Except that it also wasn’t.

Because here’s the thing. We see what a bad effect Travers Goff has had on Pamela’s whole life…not at all to say that he was just a total villain with no redeeming qualities, of course, or to downplay what a struggle it is to fight alcoholism (though we really don’t see him fighting alcoholism much at all. I would have liked to have seen more indication that he really wanted to be free of it – for his family at the very least, if not for himself. I only watched the movie once, though, so I should watch it again and see if I can catch more nuances to his character the second time round).

We also see in vivid detail how her childhood has negatively affected Pamela’s whole life. She is embittered, cynical, distrustful, lacks a spiritual foundation (we seem to see hints that she dabbles in Eastern mysticism, but it seems likely that she’s more using it as a coping mechanism/means of self-therapy than that she really feels spiritual faith), and, in a nutshell, is the aforementioned c. in h. f.

One thing we don’t see, however, is any resentment towards her father. It appears that she’s gone this whole time admiring and looking up to her father and not realizing – or at least not accepting – that she does need to forgive him for the trauma he caused her and all her family, trauma he must have known he was causing. And this completely undermined the message of the movie to me. How is Mr. Banks’ redemption a means for Pamela to feel that her own father’s story has been fixed if she doesn’t recognize that his story needs to be fixed? She already saw her father as the hero. It just doesn’t make sense this way. It feels like we’re getting the resolution to a conflict that isn’t there.

This also bothers me in that I think it’s unhealthy and wrong, really, for Pamela to admire her father as much as she did – or at least in the hero-worship kind of way that she did. I am not at all saying that she should have stopped loving him when she realized he was flawed, or that she should have ceased to respect him. We are called to love people, not to judge them. That being said, we are sometimes called to judge actions – admitting that someone we love has acted wrongly (and trying to help them fix it, if we can) is actually more loving than pretending that what they’ve done is fine. As a concrete example, Ginty (what Pamela was called as a child – sorry, it is confusing) “helped” her father by secretly sneaking him whiskey. This was what he wanted, but it was, in fact, the worst thing for him. (Of course, Ginty should not be held culpable for that, because the position she was in – feeling like she had to choose between obeying the wishes of her mother or her father, and almost certainly having no idea of the consequences of what she was doing – was a position no child should ever have to be in. Looking back as an adult, though, she should have been able to recognize how wrong that situation was, and how wrong it was for her father to put her in that position.)

In addition, we get a hint of the fact that Pamela’s excessive regard for her father has made her look down on her mother in an unhealthy way, and has made her lose respect for her mother. Sure, her mother had her flaws too, but she was also in a very hard position and I think it was very unfair of Pamela to despise her.

Now, to be fair, I should say that it’s possible that the fact that Pamela refuses to see her father as anything but the hero is supposed to be part of her problem, and maybe the resolution is meant to be us seeing her simultaneously come to terms with the fact that no, he wasn’t a perfect man, while also forgiving him for his imperfections. I, however, did not get that message out of this movie. Here’s a quote – from the climactic scene of the movie – that got me mightily puzzled:

Walt Disney: You must have loved and admired him a lot to take his name. It’s him this is all about, isn’t it? All of it, everything. Forgiveness, Mrs. Travers, it’s what I learned from your books.

P.L. Travers: I don’t have to forgive my father. He was a wonderful man.

Walt Disney: No… you need to forgive Helen Goff [who is Pamela, by the way. The woman has way too many names]. Life is a harsh sentence to lay down for yourself.

I’M GENUINELY CONFUSED, GUYS. Is the idea that she feels she should have been able to save her father, and she needs to forgive herself because she couldn’t? It’s the haunting thought that she could – and should – have saved him that has made her the hard, bitter cynic that she is? Okay, that actually does kind of make sense. But it really bothers me that no one really ever addresses the fact that her father was not perfect, that he DOES need forgiveness, that saving Mr. Banks is not just about Pamela forgiving herself but about her forgiving her father as well. That last scene, where Pamela is crying in the theater and it’s cutting back and forth between the Banks’ happy ending and Ginty slipping whiskey into her father’s bed, seems just sad to me. It doesn’t feel like Pamela’s story has been fixed. It just seems to hit home what a far cry Pamela’s life is from the Banks’.

(Also, I refuse to believe that all Pamela’s problems are just from her being haunted by the remembrance that she couldn’t save her father. I maintain that her dysfunctional childhood before that, in which she couldn’t have a healthy relationship with either parent, must have had a large part to play in that as well.)

All right, that’s enough rambling about Themes for one day. Any other thoughts…I didn’t care for the soundtrack; it sounded much too modern and not at all California-in-the-1960s to me…I did appreciate Pamela’s slow warming up to the Sherman boys’ music and to Ralph and just to life in general, while still very much remaining herself…it’s nice to see that Motty’s grown out of an irresponsible party animal into a respectable publisher or editor or whatever he was…while I definitely agree that smoking’s a bad unhealthy habit, I think it’s a little strange that Disney wouldn’t even allow a cigarette to be seen on the screen in the same movie in which they literally show a man dying because of his unchecked alcoholism.

On the positive side, I must say that I enjoyed just the fact that this movie brings some more attention to Mr. Banks. As I mentioned in a post I did about Mary Poppins a while back, I didn’t actually like Mary Poppins when I was a tyke. I only grew to like it when it suddenly struck me in adolescence that Mary Poppins herself wasn’t really the point. Mr. Banks’ character arc (and to an extent Mrs. Banks’, though we don’t get as close a look at hers) is the point, and the beauty of family is the point. Once I understood that, I enjoyed the whole movie, including all the Mary Poppins-just-being-Mary-Poppins parts, a lot more. I now consider it one of my favorite movies.

All that to say, I was glad to see Mr. Banks getting some (well-deserved) attention. We like Mr. Banks. We stan Mr. Banks. I was pleased that this movie acknowledged his importance.

All in all, what did I think? I think it had a lot of potential. If it were just a little bit different, I would like it a lot. As it is, it was interesting and I would not be averse to watching it again, but I have too many problems with its themes and how they were carried out to consider it a great movie.

Have you seen Saving Mr. Banks? Did you like it? What are your thoughts on its themes?