Next year sees the 50th anniversary of one of Walt Disney's personal masterpieces, Mary Poppins, and here's the curtain raiser from Disney Studios. It's entertaining, if exasperating; a cleverly configured and officially sanctioned drama about unofficial negotiations behind the scenes in 1961.

Only a Disney release would have the trademark rights and only a Disney movie would have been permitted the liberty of representing the great man himself.

It is the dance of seduction between the wily old master – who had been angling for decades to get the film rights to Mary Poppins – and its British author PL Travers, who was imperious, cantankerous and suspicious of Disney of America. The folksy-yet-shrewd showman and emotionally vulnerable schoolmarm are enjoyably played by Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson.

Since Saving Mr Banks premiered at the London film festival last month, there has been a lot of press comment about the fact that it suppresses much of the complexity of Travers's private life, re-inventing her as a lone spinster figure.

This, I suspect, is because of the film's laborious backstory about her painful girlhood in Australia, coupled with Disney's own intense insistence that Travers and her creation are "family", leaves no room for Travers's actual family.

It's a watchable film, with a giant-sized spoonful of sugar, though that girlhood story is tiresome and dull, with a below-par performance from Colin Farrell as her troubled old dad. It resembles a B-list Disney film in itself, like Pollyanna or Anne of Green Gables. It's a shame we couldn't get more fireworks from the incomparable Hanks and Thompson.