A cute but curious return to the Hundred Acre Wood
Christopher Robin
PG cert, 104 min
Dir Marc Forster Starring Ewan Mcgregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Mark Gatiss (in person), Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Nick Mohammed, Peter Capaldi, Sophie Okonedo, Sara Sheen, Toby Jones (voices)
Halfway down the stairs – please stop me if this sounds familiar – is a stair where Christopher Robin sits. Marc Forster’s new film is not at ground level, playing games with Paddington, but nor is it at the top with Goodbye Christopher Robin, last year’s honeytoned AA Milne biopic. Instead, it is perched half-dreamily, half-dolefully in between, getting in everyone’s way, and the urge to tell it to pick itself up and choose a floor is overpowering.
In other words, it is hard to suss out exactly who this live-action, postwarset sequel to Disney’s Winnie-thepooh animations is for. The story is adult-centric, but ostensibly aimed at children, like a remake of Mary Poppins that spends most of its time at the Dawes, Tomes, Mousley, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. Christopher (Ewan Mcgregor) is now a fully grown father of one, with an all-consuming job at a luggage manufacturer in London and a boss (a fantastically stoat-like Mark Gatiss) who expects him to work every hour God sends. His wife and daughter, played by Hayley Atwell and Bronte Carmichael, are long accustomed to coming a very distant second, so when a looming deadline makes Christopher renege on a family weekend in the country, they just go without him, leaving him to his ledgers and red ink.
But from a hole in a tree, an old friend emerges: Pooh, of course, voiced with familiar autumnal huskiness by Jim Cummings, and is roused from his generation-long hibernation by the sense that his old childhood friend is in need. Christopher panics and takes the bear back to rural Sussex, only to undergo a kind of long, dark night in the Hundred Acre Wood, where he wades through blankets of fog, wrestles with his conscience, and is beset by visions of Heffalumps and Woozles, before a reunion with Tigger (Cummings again), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Owl (Toby Jones), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and Roo (Sara Sheen).
It is less like The House at Pooh Corner than The Last Temptation of Christ with soft toys, which is an interesting course for screenwriters Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip), Tom Mccarthy (Spotlight) and Allison Schroeder (Hidden Figures) to have charted, for sure. But the story of a father recalibrating his work-life balance is not one that holds much obvious meaning for younger cinemagoers, and as told here, it lacks psychological intricacy and emotional heft to make an impact on adults.
The oddness of Christopher’s existential struggle is compounded by what feels like a serious unforced error. Rather than going down the Calvin and Hobbes route of making Pooh and friends alive in the eyes of their owner but leaving the objective truth of the matter up to us to decide, the film makes their sentience a bald fact: they really are stuffed animals who walk and talk and eat, and other people don’t notice only because they don’t look. Still, dodgy ontology aside, the creatures themselves, created by the visual effects houses Framestore and Method Studios, look completely adorable down to their last tufts of fluff, worn thin from years of love.
In fact, there are serious visual delights, from Jenny Beavan’s cosy costumes to Jennifer Williams’s storybook production design, while Matthias Königswieser’s elegiac, mist-enwreathed cinematography makes every shot of Sussex woodland look like an EH Shepard illustration come to life. The film is a joy to spend time in, rather than with – its pleasures are largely Pinterest-like – although Mcgregor throws himself gamely into the title role, splashing through streams and jousting with invisible Heffalumps, and you can see Atwell straining to invest her handful of lines with as much personality and significance as they’ll take.
The script has a good ear for Milnean wordplay, too: “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day,” Pooh remarks. But the physical comedy is significantly less nimble: Forster’s directorial CV may range from The Kite Runner to Quantum of Solace, but he has no obvious flair for slapstick, and gags involving collapsing shelves and spilt honey feel laboured, bordering on sheepish.
There was potential here for a family film with real artistry and heart, and the melancholy of childhood memories in its DNA. As it is, it’s a drawerful of some pretty odd socks.