My wife and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks because we are Emma Thompson fans from back in the day, and we have (to our mutual surprise) recently become Tom Hanks fans. The film seemed okay as I was watching it, but now I’m not looking back on it too fondly.

What can I say about this movie? It’s one-half “artistic creation” movie, and one-half woman-with-a-secret, flashback movie. In other words, it’s the dreaded ole parallel narratives thing, a device that almost never works well. All of the usual problems with parallel narratives are on display here, in particular lack of dramatic tension, confused character development, dialog distortion, and the constant squandering of emotional momentum. But even parallel narratives can be tolerable, provided one of the narratives is done well and is interesting; in this film, neither one made much of an impression on me. The flashbacks were just depressing and kind of excessively drawn out; the present-tense narrative, in which the music for the movie Mary Poppins is being created, meant well and had its moments, but the creation scenes felt contrived and a bit forced, the back and forth of the creative process was not interesting enough and felt repetitive, and about the only part I really responded to were the brief sections with Paul Giamtti, mainly because he’s such a warm and compelling actor. Overall, I found the story of how this book and movie came into being to be a little dull.

As far as the other performances go, Emma Thompson was solid, but her performance felt a bit hemmed in. Colin Ferrel is an actor who always surprises me with his ability to disappear convincingly into roles, and he does it again here with a spiffy little performance as the drunken father of her youth. Tom Hanks was good as Disney, but didn’t have much to do. Everyone else was pretty forgettable.

I guess if you love Mary Poppins to distraction you should probably see Saving Mr. Banks. For those without that particular emotional investment, it’s probably a toss-up.