This is a strange movie for *me* to be reviewing, and even stranger to be reviewing positively, but react to it positively I did. After all, it's a Disney movie, and worse, it's *about* Walt Disney, someone whose sensibilities with regard to fairy tales and the dilution of them I do not admire.
And yet. I was charmed by many things in this film. I felt that the script was wonderfully written, and directed just as well. And there have been exactly *zero* other films this year that knocked my socks off by the strength of their "ensemble performances" the way this one did. The combination of Emma Thompson as the irascible P.L. Travers, arguing tooth and nail with Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, better than I would have imagined) over whether she was going to give him the film rights to her book "Mary Poppins" are pretty much unbeatable from start to finish. Add to them Paul Giamatti as her limo driver in L.A., Colin Farrell as her father in flashbacks, and Annie Rose Buckley as Travers herself as a child, and this is pretty much a dream cast, crafting a dream. Yes, it's schmaltzy, yes, it's a bit of a tearjerker in parts, and yes, it's manipulative. But it *works*, and it's a damned pity that the Academy Awards chose to ignore it, except for its musical score. The Golden Globes, to their credit, at least nominated Emma Thompson as Best Actress, and in my opinion she acted circles around any of the other nominees, or at least the ones whose films I've seen so far. The real P.L. Travers was supposedly a total bitch who, according to her own adoptive grandchildren, "died loving no one and with no one loving her." This film showed a better side of her, one that I wish the old tyrant had gotten to see in life. If she had, she might have lightened up a bit and learned to laugh at herself a bit more, and thus had a happier life.
