Lost in the wood looking for life lessons
Quest for inner child stumbles along the way while grasping for Milne magic
Oh, bother! Disney’s live-action Winnie the Pooh film marks the second time in the past year that studios have plundered the life of Christopher Robin Milne for feelgood material.
Trouble is, C.R. Milne did not live a good-feeling life. Last autumn’s Goodbye Christopher Robin focused on the downside of becoming famous as a character in your father’s writings. And this one, heavily fictionalized, presents a grown-up C.R. Milne — his name changed to Mr. Christopher Robin — dealing with a drudgy office job at a luggage factory in postwar England. Bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy it is not.
The story opens lugubriously, with the animals of the Hundred Acre Wood — Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, Kango and Roo — sadly toasting young Christopher’s departure into adulthood. Eeyore (you thought I’d forgotten him, didn’t you?) reads a gloomy poem, after which a montage follows Christopher (Ewan McGregor) through the various hells of boarding school, the Second World War and employment, with the faintest glimmer of sunshine provided by his wife (Hayley Atwell) and daughter (Bronte Carmichael).
The Winslow luggage company has since fallen on hard times, and Christopher is tasked with bringing costs down or firing a large portion of the workforce — the simpering boss (Mark Gatiss) doesn’t really care which. He has to work all weekend and can’t join his wife and child at their cottage in the countryside.
The countryside, however, has other plans. Winnie the Pooh is magically transported to London, and Christopher has to get him back to the Hundred-Acre Wood before the honey-loving ursine destroys his home. (Jim Cummings continues his decades-long career as the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too.)
Gentle life lessons are standard fare in any Poohvie, but they’re rare and a little clunky in this outing. The screenplay was written by Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip), doctored by Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) and then given a further polish by Allison Schroeder (Hidden Figures), but I think Eeyore got his hoofs on the script before shooting started.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the result a Film of Very Little Brain, but something feels off here. Maybe it’s the way Pooh can close his eyes when sleeping, but never blinks when he’s awake. Perhaps it’s that the magical realism of the man/bear dichotomy feels like a weird mash-up of A.I. and Ted, while the father/daughter story feels seriously underdeveloped. Or it could be the convenient way the movie literally pulls its final twist out of a piece of luggage.
I’ve long felt an affinity with Milne, ever since learning that my parents came within a hair’s breadth of making my middle name Robin. I still think 2011’s Winnie the Pooh is one of the great animated films of all time. Christopher Robin tries hard to capture some of the magic inherent in Milne’s work, but it’s not an easy quality to pin down. When you head into the Hundred Acre Wood, it’s frightfully easy to get lost.