Go See “Saving Mr. Banks!”

Over the weekend, my wife Sweetie and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. As the "official" date was Sunday, February 2nd (yes, we got married on Groundhog Day!), we decided to celebrate on Saturday, as we both have to go to bed early on Sunday nights to get up for work on Monday morning. So to celebrate, we decided on dinner and a movie.

I know, not a terribly original idea for a date, but it's the type of night we don't get to have very often. So we decided to go see the Disney film, Saving Mr. Banks. My wife is a huge fan of just about anything Disney-related, and this film tells the story of how after 20 years of trying to obtain the film rights for the Mary Poppins books written by Mrs. P.L. Travers (portrayed to perfection by Emma Thompson), Walt Disney (played by Tom Hanks) convinced a very stodgy and proper Mrs. Travers to allow his company to bring the story to the big screen. In case you haven't seen it, here's the trailer:

The film has been out for a while now (it was a Christmas 2013 release), but--as I said--we don't make it out to the movie theater very often because of our schedules. I had read some reviews and had seen the trailer for the movie (my wife had not), so I knew it was a bit more than just a "how-the-movie-got-made"-type documentary; it was a dramatization based on actual incidents.

The film moves back and forth in time, with the flashbacks taking you from the period between 1961-1964, to the early-20th century Australian childhood of authoress Mrs. Travers (which we come to find out in the story is a "pen name"). As she wrestles with the writers, producers, music composers, and Walt Disney himself (played with a wonderful warmth and charm by Hanks) over the film adaptation of "her" Mary Poppins and the Banks family of the storybooks, Mrs. Travers finds herself