There’s a scene in Saving Mr. Banks where Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) tells a moving story about his childhood job delivering papers for his hard-driving father. The scene rings true, not just because that was in fact a formative experience for Disney but also because in adulthood, Disney told that story time and again in contexts not dissimilar from that in which we see him here: convincing a skeptic (or a believer, because why not) of the power of imagination to transform our experience and drive the darkness from our all-too-short lives.

It’s Disney’s unstinting belief in the power of populist art, promulgated through for-profit commercial distribution, that makes him one of the most quintessentially American cultural figures. Being Walt Disney undeniably worked very well for Walt Disney and for the millions of people who have come to adore the products of the Walt Disney Corporation. The problem with Saving Mr. Banks is it’s not about Disney’s effect on us, it’s about his effect on P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), author of Mary Poppins.

The film, written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, is based on the true story of Disney striving to please Travers, who was highly dubious about whether he would do her 1934 novel justice with his 1964 film adaptation. A premise that has the Messianic American married male artist—Walt fucking Disney, no less—showing a bitter Australian-English single female artist how to do her job right is fundamentally problematic; as Amy Nicholson puts it, the linchpin scene of John Lee Hancock’s film has Disney “mansplaining” the role of art to a woman who in reality “was a feisty, stereotype-breaking bisexual—a single mom who adopted a baby in her 40s, studied Zen mediation in Kyoto and was publishing erotica about her silky underwear 10 years before Walt had sketched his mouse.”

Even setting that issue aside, Saving Mr. Banks has basic structural issues that all the skilled performances in the world—and it has several—can’t overcome. We’re seemingly meant to believe that Travers has been hung up on a childhood trauma to the extent that it’s sucked all the joy out of her existence, with the exception of that which she somehow managed to instill in her books. “Life is a stiff sentence,” as Disney points out, and that weight of mournful decades that Saving Mr. Banks dumps on Travers is too heavy for it to fight its way out from under.

We’re constantly reminded of those decades, because a large part of the film is spent in flashback to Travers’s Australian childhood, where we’re shown the close and loving relationship she had with her charismatic, alcoholic father (Colin Farrell). Because we know from our own decades of experience that mainstream movies determine—based purely on the requirements of the plot—whether addiction is a curse or a character flaw, we keep waiting for Saving Mr. Banks to tell us what to think about the father. It never does, which in a better film could be an accurate depiction of a child’s incomplete view of a complex situation; that approach doesn’t work in the context of Saving Mr. Banks, which is, after all, a Disney film.

We see Farrell struggle at work, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear; then we see him take to the bottle, ditto; and finally we see him take ill with a condition that early-20th-century medicine might not have been able to diagnose, but that in 2013 we understand to be Ali MacGraw’s Disease—defined by Roger Ebert as that enviable affliction, found only in movies, where the principal symptom is that the gorgeous sufferer becomes even more attractive as death approaches.

If you’ve seen the trailer for this movie, it might have given you to believe that Saving Mr. Banks is a light-hearted historical romp. That it is, for roughly a total of 15 minutes. The rest of the film is more like a Hallmark Movie directed by Ingmar Bergman. When we’re not witnessing Travers’s melancholic recollections, we’re watching the film’s other characters try to cure her depression with heart-to-heart talks. Hancock dips early and often into a well of sympathy that he hasn’t spent nearly enough time earning, and the result is akin to attending the funeral of someone we didn’t know and aren’t really sure we would have liked all that much.

Much is made of Travers demanding that the Poppins story conferences be recorded on audiotape, and as the credits of Mr. Banks roll, we’re played an actual recording from those conferences. Presumably that’s meant to demonstrate how accurate the film’s portrayal of the pathologically detail-oriented author was, but at the end of this particular film it would be better not to be reminded that Travers was a real person, because that just leaves us with an even more distinct sensation that the character we’ve just spent two long hours with has been a one-dimensional caricature.

Speaking of Roger Ebert, his professional partner Gene Siskel had a simple test for the quality of movies: “Is this movie more interesting that a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” Saving Mr. Banks fails that test, and—worse—it fails its own self-imposed test of being more interesting than a low-quality audio recording of a story conference about the movie that this movie is about the making of. What else is more interesting than Saving Mr. Banks? Chances are, anything else you could find to do with ten bucks and two hours.

– Jay Gabler