Saving Mr. Banks
Do you remember the film, Saving Mr. Banks about the background to the making of the famous film, Mary Poppins? When I saw it, I didn’t log onto Rotten Tomatoes, and look at any reviews on the simple grounds that any film starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson is well worth seeing. Tom Hanks already proved that he can save Private Ryan, so why not Mr. Banks? My favorite Tom Hanks film remains Cast Away, where he portrays a Fed Ex employee who gets stranded for years on a deserted island but in the end, delivers his package. Once I saw Emma Thompson portray Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. I need no reviewer to tell me that she is one of the greatest actresses of our time. Putting Tom Hanks with Emma Thompson in the same film may not have produced the famous chemistry between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but it portrayed another classic struggle of all time. It is the struggle between “Form and Function” or “Style and Substance.”
The film brings us into the inside struggle between P. L. Travers, the author of the book Mary Poppins, and Walt Disney over the rights to turn the book into a full-fledged film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. In some ways it is a classic tale of contextualization. How do you preserve the original message of the book while presenting it in a different format (book to film) to a different generation? This is the “form and function” tension. How do you change the form or format while yet remaining true to the original function or purpose of the book? Can Dick Van Dyke dancing between several animated penguins (a major point of contention between P. L. Travers and Walt Disney) help to preserve and communicate the book’s message for many generations, or does it cheapen and trivialize the message so that the substance of the book is lost? The book is about saving Mr. Banks. The film obscured that “point” quite a bit and ended rather weakly with Mr. Banks going out to “fly a kite.”
I couldn’t help watching the film, Saving Mr. Banks, from the perspective of the challenge we face as communicators of the gospel. On the one hand, the gospel message does not change. Jesus Christ was crucified on a cross and raised from the dead to deliver condemned sinners like you and me.That basic message does not change. On the other hand, walking into a church today is more like walking into a Starbucks or Panera Bread, than walking into a hushed sanctuary or an exalted cathedral. Pastors today are sometimes asked to speak their message between a bunch of dancing penguins. Of course, we shouldn’t forget that going to ‘church’ in the first century was neither a Starbucks or a Cathedral type experience. As it turns out, both of those expressions are highly contextualized for their respective times. I am not one of those who stand against various moves to contextualize the gospel, even though I have been critical of some aspects of the mega-church, or some contemporary choruses, or a host of “gospel lite” expressions which have come our way in recent years. However, for the record, let me say that I am actually an enthusiastic supporter of contextualization. I am amazed and impressed by the creative methods that Asburyians around the world have employed to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ. My criticism is not with either the “style” or “form” of much of what I see around us in the contemporary Christian world. What I find extremely disturbing is when in the name of “contextualization” the substance of the gospel is forgotten or lost. I would never raise serious concerns about someone who put the Apostles’ Creed or prayers of repentance to a contemporary tune. But I have wondered why a church would drop the Apostles’ Creed or prayers of repentance because they are not “seeker sensitive.” So, I’m OK with dancing penguins on either side of Dick Van Dyke. However, the moment the film is no longer about Saving Mr. Banks, but about how to fly a kite, then I think we need to step back and re-evaluate if we have forgotten the whole purpose of contextualization.
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