Those eyes belong to P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the prickly British author of Mary Poppins who, at the beginning of the film (the year is 1961), is all but forced to make a much delayed hop across the pond to the crude world of Hollywood to collaborate on a Disneyfied script of her most cherished creation. It seems that Walt Disney, played by Tom Hanks, has been pursuing her for the past two decades due to a promise he made to his children to turn Mary Poppins, one of their favorite books, into a film. Travers, who insists on formalities and does not suffer anything even remotely foolish, abhors the notion of her character being given the Disney treatment, as she understandably envisions a pallid whitewashing of the story’s tougher edges, not to mention the intrusion of musical numbers and, worst of all, animation (which she dismisses as “silly cartoons”).

Thompson, with a rigid spine and perpetually unsmiling visage, turns Travers into a likeable lump of coal, if there is such a thing. Some of the film’s best moments involved her icy interactions with her Disney collaborators, screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman), who do everything they can to be ingratiating, but to little avail. Travers’s manners, however formal and refined, are consistently rude, yet you can’t help but admire her honesty, tenacity, and absolute willfulness, especially in facing down someone as overwhelming as Uncle Walt himself. For his part, Hanks does an excellent job of bringing a storied icon down to earth, giving Disney an aw-shucks humanity and charm without completely eradicating his shrewd business sense and ego (those complaining that the film doesn’t sabotage the Walt mythos are clearly living in la-la land). The homilies and casual familiarity (he insists on calling her Pam, much to her disgust) that we imagine winning over so many others barely makes a dent in Travers’s armor, which he finds absolutely perplexing and frustrating.

That Walt and the other Disney believers, including Travers’s sweet-natured chauffeur Ralph (Paul Giamatti, taking a break from his typically dyspeptic roles), eventually wear her down comes as no surprise (we know, after all, that Mary Poppins did get made and that it has—gasp—animation in it), but the screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith and the direction by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) give the film a supple enough rhythm that even the familiar beats have an enjoyable cadence. The film also contextualizes Travers’s cantankerous personality by interweaving lengthy flashbacks to her turn-of-the-century childhood, where she grew up in the wilds of rural Australia with a passionately imaginative father (Colin Farrell) who was both her artistic inspiration and her biggest letdown.

Farrell, in an impressively robust performance, provides the film’s real heart; his alcoholic bank manager loves his family dearly, yet consistently fails them in providing any sense of stability. We can see how he stimulated in his young daughter (Lily Bigham) a love of literature, history, and fanciful storytelling, yet it is the ugly downside of his high-low temperament that truly inspired the writing of Mary Poppins (we understand at the end why she scoffs with such disdain when Disney mistakenly assumes that the book is about the children). It is ultimately her father’s redemption that is truly at stake, at least in Travers’s mind, which makes the translation of her story from page to screen more than just an adaptation, but rather a judgment on her own life and the man who helped shape it.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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