Oh Pooh - this won't do!
Unbearable! Christopher Robin’s got a mid-life crisis, Tigger’s lost his bounce and Eeyore’s a bore in Disney’s dreary take on a kids’ classic
Christopher Robin (PG) Verdict: A film of very little style
MAYBE only a bear of very little brain could have blundered into a film of such little wit, charm and originality as Disney’s Christopher Robin.
The Paddington films — which it strenuously and conspicuously tries to emulate — had oodles of all three. Christopher Robin hardly has a single oodle of any of them. To put it another way, it bears no comparison.
The director is German film-maker Marc Forster, whose most garlanded picture is 2004’s Finding Neverland. That told the story of the Peter Pan playwright J. M. Barrie, who didn’t want to grow up.
This movie, set just after World War II, does the opposite, imagining its title character (Ewan McGregor) as a dreary, middle-aged man who has grown up all too joylessly.
Last year’s unrelated film Goodbye Christopher Robin, in telling the trueish story of the real Christopher Robin Milne, focused on his difficult relationship with his father, Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne (Domhnall Gleeson).
Here, the dysfunctional grown-up is Christopher himself, who has forgotten the priorities of family life. He can’t even join his wife Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and daughter Madeline (Bronte Carmichael) for a weekend at their house in the country because his job, as efficiency manager at a luggage company, requires him to stay behind in London.
Over the course of the film’s hour and three-quarters, it won’t surprise you to learn, Christopher reconnects with his boyhood friends, Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet, Owl and co (all expertly realised by computergenerated imagery, like Paddington) and, indeed, with his own boyhood self. Thus, he finds redemption, both as a husband and a father.
The film’s somewhat suspect message is that you can’t possibly be a fully-functioning adult unless you’re intimately in touch with your inner child. Only then can you stop worrying, in this instance in more ways than one, about all your baggage.
Come to think of it, something strikingly similar happened to the ubiquitous Domhnall Gleeson — or, at least, to his character — in the recent Peter Rabbit.
THAT was another fusion of live action and CGI in which U.S. screenwriters gave a makeover to one of English children’s fiction’s great furry heroes, leading to the wince-inducing anomaly of an ‘ice-cream truck’ trundling through their idea of the Lake District.
There are no such outrages here, though I don’t mind confessing that, 40-odd years after Disney animators
first turned their attentions to Milne’s immortal creation, with Sterling Holloway speaking his lines, I would still prefer Pooh to sound like he comes from Sussex, not Sacramento.
Here, he and Tigger are voiced by U.S. actor Jim Cummings, which at least strikes a blow for continuity, since he’s been doing the job on the cartoon versions since 1988. But shouldn’t Pooh sound English?
Mind you, by the same logic, Paddington should probably have a heavy Peruvian accent, so perhaps I’ll leave it there.
Back to the plot, which rather creaks and wheezes its way from the Hundred Acre Wood to London and back again. It begins with Pooh and friends giving a farewell tea party for the young Christopher Robin (Orton O’Brien), who is about to be packed off to boarding school, then moves decades forward in time, with Christopher’s daughter facing the same fate.
Still, it’s not like she’s having much fun at home, where her father even manages to suck the pleasure out of her bedtime stories.
McGregor, never the most subtle of actors, makes pretty heavy weather of all this. But then, maybe that’s the idea. It’s a film about heavy weather giving way to bursts of sunlight. Christopher’s biggest concern is his lazy, supercilious boss (Mark Gatiss), whose approval he so badly needs. There are manifest nods in the corporate scenes to the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank in Mary Poppins; after all, Disney feeds off nothing and nobody quite as voraciously as it feeds off itself.
Soon, Christopher is transported back to the Hundred Acre Wood by Pooh, having encountered him for the first time in years on a park bench in London. He got there through a magic door in a tree, which counts as a particularly eyerolling contrivance, even in a film about a man whose closest chums are a scatty bear and a lugubrious donkey.
Anyway, no sooner has Christopher found his old friends and, more significantly, himself, than he must find Madeline, who has bunked off to London to look for him.
That sets in motion a slapstick caper which, it hardly counts as a spoiler to reveal, ends in Christopher’s boss getting his comeuppance and great, gloopy spoonfuls of honey all round.
The film’s trio of writers includes Tom McCarthy, who wrote and directed the brilliant 2015 drama Spotlight, about The Boston Globe’s exposé of paedophilia in the Catholic church, so hats off to him for versatility.
FROM the outset, however, the narrative of Christopher Robin seems forced, an exercise in strained whimsy that relies too much on Pooh’s pratfalls and, to a lesser extent, Tigger’s bounciness and Eeyore’s gloom. Moreover, Pooh’s gems of homespun philosophising are randomly dropped into the script, almost as if to satisfy a checklist. ‘People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day’ is a wonderful line, given to Pooh by Milne, and doesn’t deserve to sound like something he’s read on a sweatshirt. All that said, however, I went to the balloonfestooned premiere with my 12yearold twin nieces, Liliana and Simone, who thought it ‘really great’, even if the highlight of their afternoon was having their photo taken on the red carpet with pop star Ronan Keating. They didn’t have a clue who he was, but niceties like that don’t matter at premieres. Nor, really, does the quality of the film. This one got a lusty round of applause, but then, as Pooh himself said: ‘Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon.’