The film, "Saving Mr. Banks"

The Film, "Saving Mr. Banks"

Some Thoughts

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Last night over the internet we watched the film, "Saving Mr. Banks," which depicts the making of the 1964 Disney film, Mary Poppins.

Wow! Wonderful movie! Vastly better than one might imagine from its negative reviews and the paltry attention it got. I thought the film was a knockout, with Tom Hanks as the ebullient Walt Disney, and Emma Thompson as the thorny, crotchety Mrs. P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, the magical English nanny.

The film interwove the life stories of Disney and Travers, told in flashbacks and in present time. The present time of the narration included delightful scenes in which the song-writing Sherman brothers, Robert and Richard, were depicted in full flight, working on the film.

Mr. Banks was the father of the family whose two little kids Mary Poppins was evidently dispatched to save. Banks was a stodgy London banker who had no time for his children. In the end, he takes his children, newly won over, to go fly a kite with them for the sheer joy of life. The film slyly shows a tie between Mrs. Travers' tragic father, whom she lost too early, and Mr. Banks. We are led to believe that the saving of Mr. Banks is also about saving Mrs. Travers' hapless father.

Walt Disney was always belittled by supposedly serious critics, but I don't give a damn about them. I remember loving him and his work when I was a child. 

Who Walt Disney really was came to me when I visited Epcot and Disney World as a grownup, with my then little children in tow. The whole place radiates a love of life and of our potential to make good in life. At Epcot, there is a gallery with life-affirming quotes to spur us on to embrace our own potential. There are even a couple quotes by Ayn Rand. 

By the way, over at the Harry Binswanger Letter, Ed Thompson reminds us that the otherwise catholic collection of everything anybody ever wrote on liberty, which is the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty, has 1,652 entries written by 459 authors. The Fund's founder is a conservative, evidently of the William F. Buckley or Whitaker Chambers variety, and can you guess which significant champion of liberty is missing altogether from this list? Yup, Rand. Despicable. Anybody who thinks Ayn Rand was a conservative is seriously mistaken. Clearly, Disney was not a conservative of this ilk.

Disney was a champion of loving life and of the grandness of the human spirit and a champion of human possibility, human potential, the irresistible idea of progress, and the joy of life. 

Walt Disney was not a prickly, brilliant philosopher like Ayn Rand, with dazzling, epochal solutions to some of the most vexing problems that ever bedeviled so many of the most brilliant thinkers who ever lived ... but Walt Disney embodied so many of the things Rand loved about America and the very idea of America!

I loved seeing this vision of Walt Disney rather faithfully and movingly depicted on the screen!

Rand herself understood that we go a long way towards inspiring people to embrace their own unfolding, and the political and economic liberty which this growth requires, by means of creating inspiring works of literature, including, of course, films like "Saving Mr. Banks."

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