Emma Thompson delivers an extraordinary performance as Mary Poppins’ writer, the resented, obtuse, difficult and proper L. P. Travers while Tom Hanks portrays a very compassionate and understanding yet persistent Walt Disney. I don’t remember Collin Farrell in a role as sweet and deliciously vulnerable as in this movie. Paul Giamatti and Annie Rose Buckley rounded up the exceptional cast needed to properly tell this story.
Engaging is the best word to describe this film. Walt wants the rights to produce Mary Poppins and the writer has refused his proposal for 20 years. Will he manage to get it? We all know he did because we have all seen this movie, whether as kids or parents.
The underlying story is what captures your heart: an everlasting devoted relationship –full of fantasia, romance, poetry– between a father and his oldest daughter. Although not blind to his flaws, she forgives it all, idolizes him for posterity and keeps fresh the memory of the one she adored with all her might. After loving in such a way, what made her so bitter afterwards? That is one of my unresolved questions. The other being, why my memory bank kept bringing to mind the hideous image of Nanny McPhee instead of Mary Poppins.