For some reason, mine was one of the rare childhoods in which Mary Poppins didn’t feature, so I went to see Saving Mr Banks free from expectations of reliving warm and fuzzy memories.  However, I still assumed I was in for two hours of feel-good entertainment, which is the slightly erroneous impression created by the movie's trailer.

Saving Mr Banks centres on the life of P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, shifting between her childhood in Queensland in the early 1900s and her negotiations with Walt Disney in 1961 to option the film rights to her book. It is not about the making of Disney’s Mary Poppins, although fans of the movie will delight in the pre-production scenes which depict a defiant Travers defending of the integrity of her creation, and which include snatches of the film’s famous musical numbers.

The true magic of this story lies in the real-life struggles behind Mary Poppins, as told through flashbacks to Australia, with the message that the past can shape our futures in profound and mysterious ways. The early scenes in Queensland are almost a separate movie in themselves, but their dispersal throughout the narrative is largely smooth, and enlightening rather than disruptive.

Golden Globe-nominated Emma Thompson plays the lead role with gusto, evidently enjoying the opportunity to play a curmudgeonly, unashamedly blunt character like Travers, and dominating the screen in the process. Her deadpan delivery of cutting insults and one-liners keeps the script from descending into sentimentality. The scriptwriters decided to stay with the uncontroversial version of Walt Disney, which Tom Hanks plays with aplomb, although he isn’t given much depth or complexity of character with which to wrestle.

A surprise for me was the performance of Colin Farrell, who appears in the flashback portions of the film. His portrayal of Travers’s troubled-but well-meaning alcoholic father is warm and sincere. However, even among acting royalty like Thompson, the real star of the show is the Australian child actress Annie Rose Buckley, who plays Travers’s childhood self, Helen Lyndon Goff.

The ending of the film is something of a let-down. After laborious scenes at the Disney Studios, the denouement felt like a rushed affair. Perhaps it was one final nod to Travers’s wished-for happy-ending, or an offering to the legions of fans who thought they were seeing a happy-clappy film about the making of Mary Poppins, but I found it a trite close to a serious and moving account of a real life story.

One word of advice: stay for the credits at the end of the movie and enjoy hearing a few snippets of the real P. L. Travers from 1961.