Goodbye Christopher Robin
Anyone expecting a sugar-coated period drama or a loving evocation of childhood needs to approach this film with caution. Director Simon Curtis has instead delivered something altogether more substantial and troubling. Based on Ann Thwaite’s acclaimed and meticulously researched biography of A. A. Milne, Curtis’s film is far closer to the truth (and far stranger) than fiction, despite its opening caveat that it is merely inspired by the Christopher Milne’s childhood. What it lays bare (no pun intended) is the frankly bloody awful time he had growing up in the service of Pooh.
Curtis has assembled a fabulous cast, with Domhnall Gleeson particularly strong (and almost unrecognisable) as the damaged AA Milne, shell shocked and thoroughly disgusted by the war that was supposed to end all wars. Stiff-backed and insular, Milne’s paramount need to keep it all together makes for a closed-off, introspective Dad whose unease at fatherhood is captured perfectly when he’s forced to carry his son upstairs like an unexploded bomb.
But carry him he does, which is more than be said for his wife Daphne, more concerned with wallpaper than her child’s welfare. Her actions, time and again, should make for a thoroughly self-centred and unlikeable woman, so it says much for Margot Robbie’s nuanced performance that she manages to invest enough charm and wit into the role to make Milne’s continued adulation explicable.
Perhaps less challenging is Kelly Macdonald’s task of portraying Olive, the kindly, wise and loving nanny, but only because she is so adept at playing this sort of firm-but-fair Everywoman. In a household, and film, so bereft of warmth and empathy it’s not just Christopher (beautifully realised by newcomer Will Tilston) that clings to her for humanity – so does the cinema audience.
Largely a four hander (with creditable support from Stephen Campbell Moore and Alex Lawther) the film plays out the genesis of Pooh bear, and the subsequent exploitation of Christopher in the world-wide success that followed, with a cool detachment entirely fitting to the culture of the times. Seen very much from the child’s perspective, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s screenplay wisely avoids exploring why his parents would do such a thing. Instead, we are invited to marvel, in slack jawed horror as the boy who preferred to be known as Billy Moon is paraded around like a heifer at a cattle auction, dressed up in hideous androgynous smocks, utterly bewildered, yet painfully accepting of a regime that’s a hair’s breath away from child cruelty.
If there is a shortcoming to the film, it’s in Simon Curtis’ literal minded, rather leaden direction. His background in modest television production is evident throughout, and the sluggish momentum of the first half hour suggests he has learnt little about pacing since the woefully static “My Week with Marilyn”. Much of what we see on screen is far too didactic. When Alan Milne is paralysed by the sound of bees or the bursting of a balloon, we flash back to a neutered PG rated Somme that only lessens the effect. When Ernest starts to sketch out the cartoon version of Christopher we see Tilson literally change into a drawing, and one that is not nearly as charming Shepard’s originals. And we don’t need to see that the sun always shines on the impossibly bucolic rolling Sussex hills to understand what was being fought for. Ultimately, and thankfully, the sheer force of the narrative pushes past these limitations, towards a conclusion that is so extraordinary that it could only ever work because it happens to be true, but a better director would have steered us there more artfully.
So what, in all of this, becomes of Winnie the Pooh? There were times in the cinema when I began to genuinely regret seeing this film. I love the stories about the bear with little brain, and could feel that love slipping away as the cruelty of his antecedence and the sheer delight of Milne’s prose became horrible entangled. Fortunately, Boyce’s screenplay seems to be wise to this and cleverly injects a counter to such thoughts into the closest thing the film gets to a closing speech. To reveal whose mouth it comes out of, however, would be to spoil the film’s deeply moving conclusion.
