Moments pages are Spoilers Off. Proceed with utmost caution! You Have Been Warned.
- At the premiere, we have Travers crying during the scene where George Banks solemnly walks the streets of London to the bank to be discharged, with Walt coming to her from behind to assure her that Mr. Banks will be all right, just like a father comforting his daughter. Helped along, of course, by the orchestral choir version of "Feed the Birds."
- Also, Travers' flashback with her and her father during the scene where Bert explains to Jane and Michael the troubles their father goes through.
- The ending song from Mary Poppins, "Let's Go Fly a Kite", which was originally just a happy, celebratory, uplifting song, becomes this or at least Tears of Joy once it becomes clear just who Mr. Banks was and why saving him was so important to Travers.
- Little Ginty's reaction to her father's death.Ginty: (to her Aunt Ellie) You promised that you would fix everything!
- And her aunt's reaction. She doesn't even try to defend herself from the accusation, because this is a devastated child in front of her, she did make and ultimately break the promise because some things you just can't fix, and all she can do is look away.
- The scene where there's a Two Scenes, One Dialogue between the Shermans singing "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank" and Mr. Goff making a speech at the fair.
- Followed by Mr. Goff drunkenly falling off the stage and seriously injuring himself, laughing as it happens.
- To anyone with an alcoholic parent or family member, the scene is heartbreaking in its realism. Mr. Goff is publicly humiliating himself and upsetting his children, is all too aware of this fact, but not able to act any differently. Then you cut to his wife's furious, horrified face. It covers all the emotions one feels when you see a loved one suffer from an addiction.
- That is, if you think he is aware of what he is doing to his family, instead of being too drunk to care.
- Immediately after this, Travers finally breaks and asks how the filmmakers could have made Mr. Banks so cruel. She ends her tearful speech but storming out saying 'it's as if I've failed him all over again'.
- The scene where Ginty barely saves her mother from committing suicide.
- Ruth Wilson's performance in this scene is truly haunting. She is so disconnected to reality that when Ginty tugs on her nightgown, she seems to fully realize what she was about to do and instantly begins crying and apologizing. She had an honest-to-goodness psychotic break.
- The leadup to it, too. Travers is sick in bed and the doctor tells him to lay off the bottle. Ginty comes by and he immediately asks her to bring him a bottle, but Mrs. Goff has taken it away. Poor Ginty tries to cheer him up with a poem she wrote about him that won first prize in school. He gives it a quick look then says "It's hardly Yeats, is it." So, in a desperate attempt to get him to like her again, Ginty searches for the bottle and gives it to him. That night, Mrs. Goff goes to the girls' room and says she knows what Ginty did and Ginty should take care of her sisters before leaving, implying that her daughter turning on her and becoming her father's enabler out of desperation for an ounce of love from said father was what broke her.
- Mrs. Goff's life up to this was sad, but subtly so. When the family first leaves for Allora, Travers, rather than get a carriage, has the family walk to the train station, with her lugging her own suitcase and a plant and looking very humiliated to be seen this way by her former friends and neighbours. She's clearly struggling to tend to the baby and laundry in Allora and, while she's initially happy to see Travers home early, she realizes that he's skiving off work and her joy drops away.
- Subtle, and only meaningful for those who know the history: the scene where Disney is outside, wrestling with how to handle Mrs. Travers, and he suddenly hears one of the Sherman brothers playing and singing "Feed the Birds", drawing him inside to listen. The moment is heartwarming and emotional to begin with, despite Disney downplaying how good the song is, but the Reality Subtext for anyone who knows the story is that not only did Walt consider "Feed the Birds" to be the finest song the Sherman brothers ever wrote, he constantly requested they play it for him... and then it was the song played at his funeral. This makes its connection to George Banks' walk of shame to the bank, and Travers' reaction to the scene as she connects it to her father, to be all the more poignant.
- A short one, but the scene with Robert Sherman walking with a limp, which Richard says he got from getting shot in the leg during World War II.
- Making it sadder is that in Real Life, Robert was also a decorated veteran… and also one of the first liberators of the Dachau concentration camp, one of the most notorious camps in the history of the war.
- Another one that you'd have to know a bit of history to understand: Walt mentions how hard he fought to keep the rights of Mickey from a New York executive who wanted him, because he was family. This line becomes downright sad when you remember another family member with whom Walt wasn't so lucky...
- When Walt tells Travers that he realises that Mary Poppins was there to save Mr. Banks, not the children. Poor Travers looks so scared and lost.
- A minor one, but the look on Disney's face when Travers calls his work "silly cartoons" will be very familiar to anyone who has had something they love callously dismissed by people who think it's beneath them.
- The scene where Travers Goff is fired from his job—in front of his own daughter, who'd come for "ice cream day." It's doubly painful when Ginty's reaction isn't shock or fear, but a sigh of "Are you fired again?", suggesting that she's seen this countless times before. Thankfully, the bank president, unable to hurt Ginty's feelings, decides to give Travers another chance, but still, imagine a little girl being so used to her father's alcoholism and its consequences that it fails to even move her any longer.
- Disney giving Travers his backstory, speaking about his father, his "own personal Mr. Banks". His father making him lug heavy loads of newspaper in the freezing winter until the skin peeled from his face, beating Walt if he didn't do it to his specifications and sending him to school right after, only for him and his elder brother having to go out and do the same thing after school. And this was when Walt was just a boy of eight as well.
- The whole sub plot involving P.L. Traver's youth. As a young girl when she was known as 'Ginty' she was very close to her late father despite him being an alcoholic. It is implied the reason Ginty and her family relocated from their luxury home to Allora was likely due to her father being sacked and to make ends meet gets demoted to a lower paid job in a bank in Allora and they live in a run down house. What makes it sadder is that Ginty's father keeps hitting the bottle as he struggles to accept he is to blame for why they are in poverty and it puts a strain on his relationship with his wife. Then he eventually dies in his bed due to his alcoholism causing Ginty to become the person she was as an adult.
- It bears repeating but Ginty became her father's enabler in his last times, bringing him the bottles her mother hid. Just so he would be kind to her and love her like before.
