“"Give her to me, Mrs. Travers. Trust me with your precious Mary Poppins. I won’t disappoint you. I swear that every time a person goes into a movie house – from Leicester to St Louis, they will see George Banks being saved”. Saving Mr. Banks

Sixty years ago, Mary Poppins flew from the pages of the P.L. Travers’ book to 17 Cherry Lane street, in response to the advertisement by Michael and Jane Banks, seeking a nanny who could sing, bake cakes, take them for walks, have rosy cheeks and be cheerful and reliable. That’s how the flying nanny with the neverending bag came to ‘bring order’ to a shaky house, with a mother who listens to her children and tries to bring her husband to listen to them as well, and a father who wants his house to run with precision, like the bank where he works. 

In this act of ‘bringing order’, Mary Poppins seeks to disrupt that household, where much like in banks, there is only discipline and rules. Through this disruption, she allows the family members to reconsider themselves. She lets the children be children and allows Mr. Banks to learn from them: that a patriarch of 1910’s England, ‘the era of men’, can learn from his children and that’s okay.

Saving Mr. Banks is the story of how Walt Disney obtained the rights to film Mary Poppins after twenty years of negotiations with the book’s author, P.L. Travers, a lonely woman haunted by ghosts of her past who is reluctant to relinquish the rights because doing so implies giving up other things that she cannot let go of. She made it look like she didn’t want to give up the rights because she feared that Disney would turn Mary Poppins into a magical and happy character, stripping away the meaning that it had for her, because for P.L, Pamela, Mary Poppins and the Banks were family.

After many negotiations and being on the verge of losing her house due to debts, P.L. Travers travels to Los Angeles to meet Walt Disney and the team responsible for the film’s production: screenwriter Don DeGradi and the Sherman brothers, composers in charge of the songs that have accompanied generations.

Through flashbacks, one can learn about Pamela’s childhood in a small Australian town, where her family moves due to her father’s work problems: an alcoholic and charming man whom Pamela tries to please all the time. A sick father, an overwhelmed mother, and a girl who writes.

Saving Mr Banks talks about the relationship with parents. About parental mistakes, about children burdened with adult responsibilities, and the imprints these responsibilities leave on their lives: guilt, absence, fear, sadness and loneliness.

Mary Popping is the desire for something else, the banker’s children wanting to give two pennies to the cathedral lady instead of leaving them in the bank. P.L. Travers not only had to relinquish the rights to the film, not just her heroine, but she has to allow others to be the ones who save her father.

After all, in the end, to symbolically kill one’s parents, one must save onself first: save oneself to think and re-think, and thus, someday, save in the imagination those parents we couldn’t save when we were children.