Movie Review: Christopher Robin

Aug 5, 2018 | Movies

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.

Movie Review: Goodbye Christopher Robin

Oct 15, 2017 | Children, Literature, Movies

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.