Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks (2013) is John Lee Hancock's drama you can watch online on iFILM. It traces the twenty years Walt Disney spent trying to talk author P.L. Travers into selling him the screen rights to Mary Poppins.

Travers (Emma Thompson) lands in Los Angeles prickly, dry and ready to say no to everything. Disney (Tom Hanks) keeps promising animation, songs and a happy ending — the very things she despises. While the lawyers argue over the script, the film slips back into her past: a childhood in the Australian outback, a beloved but drinking father (Colin Farrell), and the real reason her stern nanny ever existed. Paul Giamatti, Jason Schwartzman and Bradley Whitford round out the cast.

Hancock didn't make a studio biopic so much as a story about how hard it is to let go of a fiction you poured your own grief into. For Travers, Mary Poppins came to rescue not the children but her father. Stream Saving Mr. Banks (2013) online on iFILM.