New film a bear trap
The first half of Simon Curtis’s Goodbye Christopher Robin should really be called Hello A.A. Milne. It is the story of a sensitive author (Domhnall Gleeson) experiencing what we now call post-traumatic stress after fighting in the Great War, and brought out of his shellshock by the innocence and curiosity of his only son, Christopher Robin Milne.
The Milnes are benignly neglectful parents. Daphne (Margot Robbie) is more interested in social engagements than maternal ones, and considers delivery of a baby to be enough labour for one lifetime, while Alan Alexander (“Blue” to his wife and child) seems uncertain what fatherhood is all about. Christopher, nicknamed Billy Moon, grows close to his nanny, Olive (Kelly Macdonald).
Things come to a head after A.A. moves the family to the Sussex countryside but still suffers from writer’s block. Daphne goes back to London and Olive takes time off to care for her mother, leaving father and son with no alternative but to bond. It helps that Christopher, played for most of the movie by newcomer Will Tilston, is a wide-eyed and adorable moppet.
Milne might have been dimly remembered as a novelist and playwright if he hadn’t then turned to children’s poems and, shortly after, Winnie the Pooh, which was published in 1926 to universal acclaim.
This rather annoyed the author, who saw himself as a more adult writer — his 1922 novel The Red House Mystery was a kind of Sherlock Holmes satire, and he was a regular contributor to Punch magazine.
But here the film takes the first of two sharp swerves, choosing to focus not on the writer but his young muse. Christopher is caught up in the fame of the Pooh stories, and everyone wants a piece of him.
Facing reporters, flashbulbs and sacks of fan mail, he seems to be going through his own version of shellshock, his parents blithely unaware of its effects on the boy.
There’s nothing wrong with this facet of the tale, but it may take viewers a while to settle into this new course — by which time the film will have switched tracks again, with the now-grown Christopher enlisting in the next big war. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm