Hitler Ate Sugar: Saving Mr. Banks

I'm going to review Saving Mr. Banks because it was mentioned on one site's 'Worst of 2013' list- a site run by 'Industry Professionals' no less. In fairness, it didn't actually make the bottom 20, but that it was even seen as a candidate puzzled me and I had to try and figure it out.


At first I didn't notice the silhouettes and thought that this was a daringly boring (and rather blank) poster.

I think they must have objected to it on an ethical level, as I don't think you can fault Saving Mr. Banks in terms of technical merit: its script is witty, its style quite fetching and its plot engaging. Its cast never put a foot wrong. It is, I think it's fair to say, incredibly well made.
The main objection I've heard levied at the film is that it's 'Disney Propaganda' (well, that and that it's Oscar bait): people think that Disney should not have been allowed to make this film; that they are simply patting themselves on the back or, worse, demonising P.L. Travers, the authoress of Mary Poppins.
The Walt Disney presented in this film is nothing like the cruel, immortality-seeking, anti-Semitic bigot which every corner of pop culture (except, shockingly, The Walt Disney Company) has made out in recent memory. He's fun and cool and effervescent, and that's just not the truth of it, say people who never met Walt Disney. Actually, by all accounts I've ever read, Disney was extremely charismatic (so was Hitler!), at least to new acquaintances and, crucially, people he needed stuff from. Whether or not this continued in private is up for debate. But even then, I don't think Saving Mr. Banks is quite as kind on old Walt as these objectors make out: he drinks and smokes more than anyone else in the film- and I don't mean by a fraction but, in fact, quite a wide margin. He offers up 'because I wish it' as the end to an argument and expects people just to accept that and, from the reaction shot we get of the character to whom he is speaking at this point, I think we're meant to understand that she's a little afraid of Disney.
Of course, if you believe everything you read, which I really don't think you should, this is nowhere near the fire-breathing, swastika-bearing, employee-murdering ogre he was in real life, but I can't think of a single portrayal of a real person on screen that has been hailed as anywhere near accurate. Real people, in my opinion, do not translate well to screen: we're too inconsistent- we'd just be decried as poorly characterised. And besides, most real people are boring- they rarely deliver a great one-liner or deliver a really rousing monologue at the eleventh hour, which are another two extremely juvenile conventions of mainstream, 'unintelligent' cinema which I just adore (and which occur in Saving Mr. Banks with some frequency).
However, if Disney have cleaned up Walt's actions a bit to make him appealing, then they haven't really mussied Travers, from what I can tell. By all accounts, she really was an exceptionally stubborn and quite rude woman- Thompson at least has the courtesy to make her funny.
Was it self-congratulating of Disney to make this film? Yes. Undoubtedly. But then, I think they can allow a little bit of self-congratulating: in Mary Poppins, they made a brilliant film with a lovely aesthetic and engaging lead performance and in Saving Mr. Banks, they've repeated that success.
If you don't want to get sucked into the Disney propaganda machine, you don't have to; seeing Saving Mr. Banks isn't going to brainwash you into loving the mouse, but it'll entertain you for two hours, I bet.

Think of the Children: Philomena

I was slightly trepidacious about Philomena- the trailer made it look rather twee and sentimental- which, while not always a bad thing, can be grating.
I was wrong.

Philomena is an incredibly well-made film. The performances are brilliant, the script is canny, and, another worry I had which was totally allayed, it never stops; it doesn't meander about the point as quite a lot of emotion-driven 'true life' stories do (I'm looking at you, The Impossible) but every scene leads to the next quite wonderfully, and there's actually quite a bit of plot. Yay. Plot is good.
The real reason I liked Philomena so much, and I know this will sound juvenile at first, so I'm gonna explain myself, is that it has an antagonist. I like antagonists- I know it's not the vogue in 'intelligent' or 'arthouse' cinema to have a proper villain, but I think that's a shame because I feel they add a lot to a story. A character on whom both the audience and the protagonists can focus their efforts in removing or rehabilitating or just hindering for a little while really helps engage me, and, I suspect, a lot of cinema goers. And I need to be engaged: it's all very well telling an incredibly apropos, intelligent and topical story but if I'm bored you won't teach me anything and worse, you'll make your cause look unworthy. This was one of my many problems with Zero Dark Thirty (others being a dull screenplay and Jessica Chastain); the film didn't put any effort into making the moment of Bin Laden's death (I refuse to mark that as a spoiler, read a newspaper) into a moment of release for the audience- it just expected us to bring in all our pre-conceived hatred of him. Honestly, it was lazy.
But Philomena delivers on the antagonist front and, while the character is in no way central to the film, it adds a sense of poignancy to the climax and allows for some very deep, and really rather interesting, theological-cum-philosophical debate between the leads about anger. I'm not ashamed to say I was riveted.
There is a real sense of sadness pervading this film, which makes sense when you think about it. There is a tragedy in the background of all the events which cannot be undone and cannot be ignored, which, I think, is as it should be- although the film does not shy away from discussing the pros and cons of holding onto indignation or just letting it pass. It contains some exceedingly interesting debates about religion and morality, and while these are hardly new philosophies to be exploring, it does so with aplomb.
A special word should be said about Dench, who, unsurprisingly, is very talented. But what's remarkable is how much I believed her as a run-of-the-mill, everyday woman; Dench is rather glamorous in real life, but you don't watch her thinking about the incredibly unhumdrum life she leads, but just completely believe that, were it not for the plot, she'd be sitting at home watching David Attenborough. She's natural to a level that is quite astounding.
I can't really find much to fault about the piece:there's no element that stands out as poorly crafted or problematic. Philomena could easily have been a two hour TV movie with about thirty minutes of actual content and an awful lot of padding, but instead it's an absorbing and witty feature that delivers in terms of characters, plot and pathos.