Saving Mr. Banks

Directed by John Lee Hancock

(PG-13)

***

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“How do you make an involving film about a situation whose outcome is already known?” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. This “savvy” drama about the making of Mary Poppins does it by diverting from history when it needs to and leaning on a “gleeful ripsnorter of a performance” by Emma Thompson. “There are other fine actors on-screen,” including co-star Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. But as Disney tries to charm ornery children’s author P.L. Travers into letting him put Mary Poppins at the heart of a movie musical, “Thompson’s the show”: “Each withering put-down” that her Travers delivers “lands with a little ping.” But both Travers and Disney have had their sharp edges softened by the script, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. “There’s no hint of Walt Disney’s reputation as a tyrant or of Travers as the tortured soul she was.” Weirdly, though, we don’t care that Saving Mr. Banks does to the true story what Travers feared would happen to her Poppins books: In fact, “we’re glad to be seduced.”