{"id":2563,"date":"2013-12-27T09:39:08","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T14:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=2563"},"modified":"2014-01-04T06:48:49","modified_gmt":"2014-01-04T11:48:49","slug":"2563","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2013\/12\/27\/2563\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving the Grownups"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n<\/a>Anthony Lane’s review of\u00a0Saving Mr. Banks<\/em> reveals exactly how the film succeeds in captivating our attention:<\/p>\n

\u201cSun came out to say hello to you!\u201d Travers\u2019s driver (Paul Giamatti) says, as she arrives in Los Angeles. \u201cDon\u2019t be preposterous,\u201d she replies, and the movie is revived by that testiness and wit\u2014the same qualities that rang through the fantastical briskness of the Poppins novels. Just as Mary rescued the wilting Banks family, so Thompson saves the film. A spoonful of her medicine makes the sugar go down<\/em><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/cinema\/2013\/12\/23\/131223crci_cinema_lane<\/p>\n

Beyond the collision of acerbic wit with a sunny disposition, there are powerful competing arguments in the film about what is “for your own good” when it comes to entertainments for children. \u00a0“Where is the\u00a0gravitas?” Travers asks a befuddled Walt Disney, who is committed to spiritual uplift with jaunty dialogue and upbeat tunes. \u00a0After all,\u00a0Mary\u00a0Poppins<\/em>, as the screenwriters imagine the book, was born of an adult’s need to work through childhood trauma. \u00a0Walt and Pamela both suffered as children, with Walt bending to the will of an exploitative father who insists that his sons help out in the family business by delivering newspapers, no matter how cold it is or how long it takes, and Pamela witnessing an alcoholic father’s painful descent into dysfunction, illness, and death.<\/p>\n

As adults, the two take different approaches to producing entertainments for children, and their views mirror the bifurcation of opinions in the field of children’s literature, with protectionists on one side and the “anything goes” folks on the other. \u00a0Real life is fairly miserable, Rousseau lectured parents, and you might as well indulge the young.\u00a0\u201cLove childhood,” he wrote in his educational tract Emile<\/em>, “promote its\u00a0games, its pleasures, its amiable instinct.” \u00a0That’s just what Walt Disney would say. \u00a0Travers, by contrast, takes the view that we should not sugarcoat, that we should not play “let’s pretend” and instead teach children about the harsh realities of life. \u00a0Mary Poppins<\/em> does not exactly belong to the “hard facts” school of children’s literature, and Disney entertainments, as we know from all those crafty wicked figures dressed in purple and black (with a touch of gold), give us more than spoonfuls of sugar. \u00a0But\u00a0Saving Mr. Banks<\/em> offers a great little tutorial on the high stakes in the game of writing for children, and it reminds us, in its title, as elsewhere in the film, that the redemption of adults might be the real holy grail sought by authors of children’s books.<\/p>\n

And here’s Zo\u00eb Heller in\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, January 4, 2013:<\/p>\n

The new movie \u201cSaving Mr. Banks\u201d advertises itself as the story of how Walt Disney \u201cworked his magic\u201d to \u201cbring Mary Poppins to life.\u201d This tag line doesn\u2019t just insult the author, P. L. Travers, who had already brought Mary Poppins to life very nicely, without Hollywood\u2019s ministrations; it also does a disservice to Walt Disney\u2019s boldness as an adapter. If there\u2019s one thing Disney clearly did not attempt in the movie, it was to \u201ccapture\u201d or portray the snappish, volatile, lower-middle-class nanny of the books. His infinitely more audacious decision was to kill off that Mary Poppins and replace her with another character altogether, a plummy-voiced, uncomplicatedly benign personage played by Julie Andrews.<\/em><\/p>\n

We may feel that Travers\u2019s Poppins is a more interesting and beguiling character than the one Disney invented \u2014 just as we may judge F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cGatsby\u201d to be a superior work of art to Luhrmann\u2019s club remix. But this is only to say that Luhrmann\u2019s and Disney\u2019s genius was not equal to that of the authors from whom they borrowed. It does not follow that Luhrmann and Disney would have made better movies by being more respectful of the originals.<\/em><\/p>\n

Most adaptations don\u2019t achieve greatness (most films don\u2019t, most art doesn\u2019t), but those that do \u2014 Nicolas Roeg\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Look Now,”Vittorio De Sica\u2019s \u201cThe Garden of the Finzi-Continis,\u201d Robert Hamer\u2019s \u201cKind Hearts and Coronets,”Luchino Visconti\u2019s \u201cThe Leopard,\u201d most of Hitchcock\u2019s oeuvre \u2014 are not distinguished by any unusual degree of loyalty to their original texts. Conversely, some of the dullest adaptations are the most slavishly \u201cfaithful.\u201d (See Peter Jackson\u2019s version of \u201cThe Hobbit,\u201d a movie bogged down in C.G.I. and its director\u2019s desperate determination not to offend Tolkien fans.) Given the choice between Jackson\u2019s reverence and Disney\u2019s chutzpah, I think I\u2019d plump for the latter. At least \u201cMary Poppins\u201d the movie gives us some good songs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Lane’s review of\u00a0Saving Mr. Banks reveals exactly how the film succeeds in captivating our attention: \u201cSun came out to say hello to you!\u201d Travers\u2019s driver (Paul Giamatti) says, as she arrives in Los Angeles. \u201cDon\u2019t be preposterous,\u201d she replies, and the movie is revived by that testiness and wit\u2014the same qualities that rang through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2563"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2569,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions\/2569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}