With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small non-profit, one-screen movie theater in Williamstown (charming home of Williams College).
The films differ in many of the ways I cited when comparing Apollo 13 and Captain Phillips (10/21/13), with Mr. Banks far more structurally complex than Philomena, a fairly linear narrative recounting an Irish woman’s search for her out-of wedlock child, taken from her when he was three. As part of Philomena’s story, the film informs us of the horrors of a particular Catholic home for unwed mothers (and we remember the many exposés in recent decades of similarly abusive Irish institutions for children that thrived in the 1950s). Flashbacks tell us how Philomena conceived and then lost her child. Somewhat more avant-garde are the flash-forwards that seem to be Philomena’s imaginings of her son and turn out to be part of a video montage of the child’s life that his friend has compiled. An on-going dialogue between the two main characters about the virtues and abuses of faith never fully resolves the issue, but the narrative’s many unexpected twists and turns organize the film and hold our attention
By contrast, Saving Mr. Banks, which tells the story of P.L. Travers’ negotiations with Walt Disney over the rights to film Mary Poppins, has a much more complex, multi-layered structure, whose over-arching theme is the redemption of all imperfect fathers through art, e.g. cinema. Where the flashbacks in Philomena fill in the beginning of her story, the purpose of the flashbacks in Mr. Banks, which detail Travers’ rich and troubled childhood relationship with her alcoholic father, remains a mystery until the various threads of the father theme begin to coalesce in the last third of the film. Although both Judi Dench as Philomena and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers are worth the price of admission, Saving Mr. Banks is more artistically satisfying and, for anyone who is or has had an imperfect father—which may include most of us—cathartic and restorative. We are moved by Philomena’s story, but Mr. Banks’s story is ultimately our own.
Both films expand on a recent trend in docudrama—one Steve and I find delightful—of including film footage, stills, and, in the case of Mr. Banks, audio recordings of the actual historical characters in the credit roll.