Film Review: Just a spoonful of sugar

The author stubbornly holds on to her creation in the face of its imminent Disneyfication. Travers's father died when she was seven and her literary enterprise is presented as her attempt to keep alive the man she loved so much as a little girl.

Saving Mr Banks

Director: John Lee Hancock

Cast:Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell, Paul Giamatti, Bradley Whitford, BJ Novak, Jason Schwartzman, Ruth Wilson

I have a deep ingrained memory of being forced by my sister to repeatedly watch Mary Poppins, the 1964 Disney movie that won five Oscars and has made over $100-million for the Disney corporation.

I know all the songs, remember all the scenes of Julie Andrews and her charges cavorting with animated animals, and still cringe at the sound of Dick van Dyke's awful attempt at a cockney accent.

I haven't seen the film in decades. Now, thanks to Disney's slightly corporate backslapping story of the struggles between PL Travers, the mercurial, prim author of the original books, and good 'ole, all-American Walt Disney to get the film made, there's a fresh reason to remember the mysterious nanny with the parrot-handled umbrella who flew in from nowhere and changed the lives of the Banks family.

Played with spinsterly propriety by Thompson, Travers is presented as a woman with a tragic past who can't let go of her creation because of its associations with her own childhood. The story flashes back between Travers's childhood as Hilda Goff, daughter of Travers Goff (Farrell) - an alcoholic dreamer trapped in his job as a banker in early 20th-century Australia - and 1961, when Travers finally agreed to give Disney the rights to Mary Poppins and travelled to Hollywood to work on the script.

The author stubbornly holds on to her creation in the face of its imminent Disneyfication. Travers's father died when she was seven and her literary enterprise is presented as her attempt to keep alive the man she loved so much as a little girl.

The true story of PL Travers includes an interesting chapter involving her relationship with her adopted son, but this doesn't fit into the writers' neatly dovetailed Disney version of how everyone's favourite Disney film was made.

Hanks, too burly for Disney and using his pencil moustache as a substitute for any kind of real interpretation of the man, can't quite keep up with Thompson, who refuses to oversimplify her character and makes her a complicated woman with all the best lines in the film.

It's not unentertaining and it will give Mary Poppins acolytes plenty of nostalgic tummy-warming moments, but ultimately the film suffers from the very thing Travers was afraid Disney would do to her creation. There's an all too easy inclination to let the sunshine in and sculpt the truth into convenient, neat homilies that can be set to music in a world where all problems can be solved by the happy sight of talking animals doing a sing-a-long.

• 'Saving Mr Banks' opens at cinemas nationwide today

What others say

There's a sorry lack of spark between Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

This is a delicate and brilliantly acted story of overcoming the past to embrace an uncertain future. Emma Thompson is magic.

Helen O'Hara, Empire

It's a wonderful film that you deserve to experience.

Mark Hughes, Forbes