I enjoyed this movie too. I think it may have been a special challenge for Emma Thompson to play someone so uptight, so closed in. I did not know that Travers was even worse as a human being than as Thompson played her out.
One of my earliest spiritual epiphanies occurred in the parking lot of Disneyland (I had been there once before, some 15 years previously). I had watched a lot of the real Disney on TV in my youth. Something special about him. I had gone to Los Angeles to look over equipment offerings at a convention. I ended up really exhausted, and sick. I had a half day to kill, I went to Disneyland in Anaheim. I went on rides. I don't remember what I ate. I even went through that ride some old geezer sued the park for for having stranded him there for a few hours - It's a small world. As I left the park, I felt just miserable, but in thinking about what Disney had created I experience an overwhelming appreciation of what he had managed to accomplish and I just broke down and cried in the parking lot. A huge wave of release, followed by a deep silence. Probably the third or fourth spiritual experience I ever had, just a few months after the first one I ever had. I think I must have been (and still am in some ways) like Travers, closed in and tight, not really realising just how out of the stream of life I was. I was with someone years later in an amusement park in St. Louis. She felt such parks were superficial, but then realised that she observed that everybody she was watching seemed happy - everyone, not just a few here and there. Disney had a good heart, and he knew how to market feeling good, or perhaps out of necessity, he learned how to market it. Twenty two Academy Awards, and four honorary ones. Not bad. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: This is a strange movie for *me* to be reviewing, and even stranger to be reviewing positively, but react to it positively I did. After all, it's a Disney movie, and worse, it's *about* Walt Disney, someone whose sensibilities with regard to fairy tales and the dilution of them I do not admire. And yet. I was charmed by many things in this film. I felt that the script was wonderfully written, and directed just as well. And there have been exactly *zero* other films this year that knocked my socks off by the strength of their "ensemble performances" the way this one did. The combination of Emma Thompson as the irascible P.L. Travers, arguing tooth and nail with Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, better than I would have imagined) over whether she was going to give him the film rights to her book "Mary Poppins" are pretty much unbeatable from start to finish. Add to them Paul Giamatti as her limo driver in L.A., Colin Farrell as her father in flashbacks, and Annie Rose Buckley as Travers herself as a child, and this is pretty much a dream cast, crafting a dream. Yes, it's schmaltzy, yes, it's a bit of a tearjerker in parts, and yes, it's manipulative. But it *works*, and it's a damned pity that the Academy Awards chose to ignore it, except for its musical score. The Golden Globes, to their credit, at least nominated Emma Thompson as Best Actress, and in my opinion she acted circles around any of the other nominees, or at least the ones whose films I've seen so far. The real P.L. Travers was supposedly a total bitch who, according to her own adoptive grandchildren, "died loving no one and with no one loving her." This film showed a better side of her, one that I wish the old tyrant had gotten to see in life. If she had, she might have lightened up a bit and learned to laugh at herself a bit more, and thus had a happier life.
