Screened at The Fourcroft Hotel on May 19, this movie was pleasingly and psychologically more profound than anticipated. Pitting emotionally-unbending author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) against Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), no less, who is trying to film Mary Poppins in complete, schmaltzy, Disney-style 'Saving Mr Banks', in a series of flashbacks, explores the need many of us feel for a wish-fulfilment character like Mary Poppins in our lives. The eponymous 'Mr. Banks' is both the real-life father whom Travers adores as a little girl, despite his alcoholism, and the Mr. Banks of the film 'Mary Poppins'. Both Mr. Bankses are bankers who come unstuck financially through their own profligacy. Ultimately, Travers's dying father causes the child great emotional pain by being too intoxicated to notice the stories she writes. Subconsciously, the tight-lipped, adult Travers, harnesses the cathartic process of creative writing in her Mary Poppins books and this is what appeals to Disney, who also had a neglectful father and who, it seems, invented the whole, make-believe, Disney brand to console traumatised children and adults: this, I feel, is both the film's message - for which of us hasn't been deeply hurt, in some way, when young? - and its apologia for the undiluted saccharine of everything Disney. And is anyone truly surprised when Travers is eventually won over to the filmic 'Disney-fication' of her Mary Poppins books? In Travers's personal, psychological journey, the Mr. Banks who was her father and who nurtured her creativity, is reinstated as her childhood hero through her ultimate acceptance of the value of 'Disney-fiction'. As the great, 20th century artist, Modigliani, famously decreed: "Your real duty is to save your dream" - a duty which both Disney and Travers carry out big time. The next film to be shown at the Fourcroft on June 2 is Twelve Years A Slave and on June 16, Captain Phillips.

R.A.