Trying hard and badly wanting to capture the childlike charm of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character, Christopher Robin is mixed and bothered. I have been looking forward to this movie for months. Credit goes to Disney’s marketing. Ads make it look as benevolent as Winnie the Pooh. Who better to direct than Marc Forster, who directed the London-based, fairy tale-themed Finding Neverland?
That was a dark and poignant film laced with a sense of wonder, which Christopher Robin lacks. Combining realism with fantasy in this case nixes the impact of both. Positioning the title character’s (Ewan MacGregor doing his best in a limited role) imaginary childhood friends as catalysts to rescue Robin’s inner child, a fine and lovely premise, the film, written by six writers, is unfocused and forced.
Each animal character is based on the original stories’ conjurings by A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard. Portrayals, lines and depictions of Tigger, Pooh and Eeyore are simply excellent. What they say is often amusing, witty and wise. Voices are superb. But the audience knows that the plot revolves around the London war veteran turned Winslow Luggage Company bean counter Christopher Robin. It’s a constricting, contradictory subplot.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be the main plot.
If the world of Winnie the Pooh originates in Christopher Robin’s imagination, and as an adult he’s joined the rat race and gone bad, lost himself or been damaged, then the characters rallying to save him amount to Christopher Robin saving himself. This could have been an outstanding angle.
But the writers instead inexplicably have the Hundred Acre Wood characters, such as Piglet, interact with other humans. Why characters imagined in Christopher Robin’s mind can be heard by others (let alone why they are stuffed, as against animated) makes no sense. It breaches the film’s sense of make-believe.
Worse, Christopher Robin deprives its main character of motivation; after all, if he is a louse, why ignore why he sold out, i.e., response to combat fatigue? Instead, Robin gets an unhappy wife (Hayley Atwell) and daughter. It’s as if a memo came down to put this movie together by formula, with directives to have a family and certain subsidiary themes, where a proper leading character motivation should have been.
In any case, the worlds do not mesh. Pooh’s is thoughtfully developed. Robin’s is not.
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London is sufficiently rainy, foggy and gray and Christopher Robin looks true to period detail. But rendering Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, et al, as stuffed toys that can interact with everyone, meaning everyone in postwar Britain can see and hear the stuffed animals talk, diminishes their uniqueness.
Also, making capitalism seem incompatible with creativity further distances Robin from reality, making him harder to redeem. That Winslow’s big boss and industrial building are impressive suggest that the company rewards, not scorns, lean solutions, which contradicts the plot.
Bits about heffalumps and woozles play to facing one’s fears. Eeyore groans about having to go with the flow…toward self-destruction. Pooh asks Christopher Robin whether it’s time to let go. There’s greatness buried here, showing that Christopher Robin could’ve been like the intelligent riddle it wants to be.
But the movie splits with rationality again and again. “It’s our job to prepare her for life,” Robin says about his child to his wife at one point during a setup for the climax. This is apparently intended as evidence that he’s stiff and uptight. It is exactly a parent’s role to prepare a child for life. This includes and fully aligns with imagination.
Whomever is in charge of this film doesn’t know it.
A postscript about end credits: many of today’s movies include plugs, tie-ins and extra scenes or bloopers. I choose not to account for these. Such snippets are extraneous as far as I’m concerned and do not merit mention, let alone evaluation. If they amount to a plot point, they ought to have been included in the film. Not after The End.
Goodbye Christopher Robin means well. With gentle storybook strokes, the biographical motion picture about A.A. Milne, who created and wrote the Winnie the Pooh children’s books, plays from Milne’s traumatic soldiering in World War 1 to his books becoming a worldwide bestselling literary series and beyond. Shown through flashbacks of battlefields, courtship and an only child, with fear of war looming over England, her war veterans and their survivors, Milne’s reconciliation of his war trauma comes through writing what’s childlike.
Reconciling with the child upon whom his stories are based is the movie’s centerpiece. In the showing and telling, and parts of this uneven movie are magically shown and told, the audience gets a sense of the writer’s life. That living with a writer, as Mrs. Milne (Margot Robbie, The Legend of Tarzan) must do, is unbearable. That working for a writer, as the child’s nanny (Kelly Macdonald, Merida’s voice in Brave and Anna Karenina) does, is also a constant strain. That having a storyteller for a father, as the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Milne’s union does, both draws and repels his attention without ever fully gaining his guidance and love.
The child is the Pooh series’ basis, of course, for the character Christopher Robin. I’ll leave it to Goodbye Christopher Robin to spell out the complications of having that name and all it implies for his boyhood. Here, the boy is taken away with his parents to escape London’s triggers for his father’s post-war trauma to live in a cottage near the woods in Sussex. You can probably guess what follows, with stuffed animals, trips to the zoo, an imaginative mother and father, moonlight, sunrays and the wonder of them all blending into the woods. An origin story within the story satiates one’s interest in the Pooh tales; most details are dramatized here.
As Mrs. Milne, Robbie’s a bit overly dramatic or possibly miscast. Daphne Milne’s looks don’t age as persuasively as her husband’s (Domhnall Gleeson, Ex Machina, Star Wars, Brooklyn). As Milne, Gleeson is superb, catching the writer’s irritability, the soldier’s torment, the husband’s lament and the father’s pride. The script does not allow him to show the writer writing, which would have tethered Goodbye Christopher Robin to the tales in a way that director Simon Curtis (Woman in Gold) apparently and understandably wants to avoid.
The result leaves loose ends. Daphne, for example, tenderly helps her future husband to heal when she guides him in how to lead and again later when she instructs him not to plead. Yet their bond never quite seals.
The books’ illustrator, one of the more compelling characters, trails off and disappears. The main two actors who portray the boy at differing ages, Alex Lawther and Will Tilston, are excellent, however, the screenplay does not fully account for the abrupt change in character which merely marks the boy’s progression. His emergence should be the film’s pivot point. Goodbye Christopher Robin contains insights about being the child of a creator — especially about being born to a talented creator whose creation becomes a commercial success — fathering, mothering and nurturing and, in the end, it suggests that parenting as an ideal simply and strictly means preparing the child to live, which is harder than it sounds, particularly for the walking wounded of the Great War.
As a war veteran-writer-father’s fable of how Milne made the most of his moments with his son, fencing and playing cricket in the forest, for the wonderful, childlike stories of Winnie the Pooh, Goodbye Christopher Robin leaves something unfulfilled. But there are also not many movies about sons of men who went to war and lived to write delightfully life-affirming tales. This movie’s lacking, but it hits sweet spots along the trail. It might be considered a must by fans of the books.
Six years after Tim Burton adapted Lewis Carroll’s children’s tale of Alice in Wonderland, the Walt Disney Studios brings Burton back as a producer, teamed again with screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Maleficent) and the same cast, in a sequel directed by James Bobin. The result, Alice Through the Looking Glass, is entertaining if underwhelming.
Seen in IMAX 3D at Comcast’s Universal CityWalk in Universal City, California, the movie pops off the screen with wildly colorful characters, settings and situations. When plot points converge and gain steam, however, things go limp. Lead actress Mia Wasikowska as Alice has less to do because the character goes from serious young woman with something to learn to heroic captain of her own ship (in Victorian England), which modernizes yet mixes the story’s context and raises the bar for whatever lesson Alice has yet to learn. The lesson, it turns out, is acting within limits.
This idea has marvelous potential, which is partially redeemed in the main conflict involving Time (absurdist Sacha Baron Cohen of Hugo and Borat), a character that controls life and death in Underland with a source called the Chronosphere. Alice, facing another difficult life decision and led back to Underland through the “looking glass” by the late Alan Rickman-voiced blue butterfly, encounters Time, seizes the metallic Chronosphere and darts into a new adventure. Alice seeks to revive the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), known here as Hatter, by going back in time to right presumed wrongs.
Instead, Alice discovers other wrongs. The same characters, including Anne Hathaway’s White Queen and Helena Bonham Carter’s exiled Red Queen, appear throughout Alice Through the Looking Glass. Once again, Carter (Cinderella, Suffragette), in cahoots with Time, is the big-headed villainess.
If it sounds convoluted, that’s because it is. The film skates on visual appeal with Jules Verne and Gothic influences and the promise of unbundling character backstories contained in Woolverton’s script. At best, Depp’s Mad Hatter refusing to be like his father (Rhys Ifans) and Wasikowska’s Alice refusing to be like her mother echoes nicely as both characters discover similarity and difference and strive to remain friends in a test of unresolved conflicts.
Problems arise with the climax.
With Underland in danger of crumbling, and symbolic scenes of escaping a madhouse, Alice Through the Looking Glass employs an already well-worn tread of revising a villain’s past (i.e., Maleficent) to explain and rationalize certain behavior. Good is bad and bad is good, or some such approximation and, here, none of it is reasonably addressed or resolved. Indeed, some of it contradicts what happened in Alice in Wonderland. Worse, in a movie for children, Woolverton leaves multiple loose ethical ends and ties Alice, once a warrior challenging tradition for her own sake, down to an act of altruism, making her a conformist after all. Other notions—the Mad Hatter’s intuition, for instance—are tossed in at the last minute.
The moving pictures of Time’s clock parts, such as the Seconds and Minutes, and costumes, including Alice’s embroidered Chinese getup for the party, by Colleen Atwood (Chicago, Into the Woods) are brilliant and Alice Through the Looking Glass is at times stunning to look at and behold. A closer look reveals its flaws.
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The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen (English translation by H.P. Paull, illustrations by Ripple Digital Publishing Corp.) is a brilliantly written fable. I recently re-read it and found that, in its own way, the tale repudiates collectivism and egalitarianism – the idea that everyone should be regarded as equal in everything – with a clever inversion.
Without revealing the story’s twist, the duckling is born ugly, which he can’t help. Other ducks ridicule, even assault, him just for being different. His own siblings spurn him. At first, his mother defends him until, seeking others’ approval, she finally says she wishes he had never been born.
After more rejection and abuse, he flees his family for another group’s domain, where he is told that he will be tolerated as long as he doesn’t marry into the collective. He moves on to a group of wild ducks, facing the threat of the huntsman. With shots firing, and birds falling around him, the Ugly Duckling chooses to think; he hides, waits and bides his time to leave when it’s safe. When he does depart, he is exceedingly cautious. He takes nothing for granted. It’s the first hint that he might be better than everyone else. This is made explicit in the next part of the story when he is castigated by a hen for thinking he’s better than others as he finds himself among a trio of misfits. “Do you consider yourself more clever than the cat, or the old woman?” asks the hen. “Don’t imagine such nonsense, child, and thank your good fortune that you have been received here.”
The Ugly Duckling refuses to be humble. In encounter after encounter, he senses that he might be special. He sadly moves on after each episode, seeking happiness, and the lonely path he takes exacts a heavy toll. That he sees himself as he truly is only when he makes himself ready to give up climaxes the moral of the story, which is a kind of fable about authentic self-esteem. Adversity makes you stronger is certainly part of Andersen’s point but The Ugly Duckling is not, as is sometimes claimed, merely about being different. It is also a tale about discovering and becoming aware of one’s potential. The notion that one should accept himself as he is, recognizing limitations and strengths and accepting that life is hard, and pain is temporary, is obviously relevant to those who are different. But this story is also, and not as obviously, meaningful to the one who is better than others yet unaware of the truth.
Author’s Note
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Reconciling with the child upon whom his stories are based is the movie’s centerpiece. In the showing and telling, and parts of this uneven movie are magically shown and told, the audience gets a sense of the writer’s life. That living with a writer, as Mrs. Milne (Margot Robbie, 
Seen in IMAX 3D at Comcast’s Universal CityWalk in Universal City, California, the movie pops off the screen with wildly colorful characters, settings and situations. When plot points converge and gain steam, however, things go limp. Lead actress Mia Wasikowska as Alice has less to do because the character goes from serious young woman with something to learn to heroic captain of her own ship (in Victorian England), which modernizes yet mixes the story’s context and raises the bar for whatever lesson Alice has yet to learn. The lesson, it turns out, is acting within limits.