Christopher Robin
I can’t speak as to why the powers that be at Mouse Inc. thought to make a live-action Winnie the Pooh film involving a now-adult Christopher Robin, but it did, and as such I can empathize to a certain degree with the film’s creative team (including, bizarrely enough, indie filmmaker darling Alex Ross Perry, who is one of the listed screenwriters): How do you make a palatable, family-theme uplifting film about a crushingly sad situation that in real life remains one of the more depressing stories in the annuls of children’s literature?
To quickly recap: A.A. Milne, a British writer of some renown, returning from WW I service suffering from PTSD, bought a country house in Sussex as a means of quelling his nerves. He also became a doting father on his son,
young Christopher, whom he entertained with stories involving some of his son’s stuffed animals, including a teddy bear (Pooh) among others, in part, one can imagine, as a salve for his post-war psychological damage. These stories were eventually contained in prose and verse, and sold as children’s books that became wildly popular, obviously; an outcome that Milne foresaw could eventually be problematic for his son, as he grew older.
Flash forward to Christopher’s adulthood, and he was indeed perturbed and embittered at what he saw as his father’s exploitation of his childhood. He renounced his parents, and went on to marry his cousin as a testimonial as to how little his family ties mattered to him. Milne himself was also somewhat ambivalent about the Pooh books, as they so far eclipsed his other work that he became somewhat resentful of their popularity. After the author’s death in 1956, his widow gave her part of the rights to the characters to a Hollywood producer named Stephen Slesinger, whose widow eventually sold them to Walt Disney, where they were quickly transmuted into the vastly more syrupy and dunderheaded properties most American kids have grown up with, a result that could have pleased no one in Milne’s family.
Last year’s bittersweet Goodbye Christopher Robin
addressed at least some of these problems in more of an adult drama manner. This film, caught between the Diznee-fied Pooh stories, and the reality of Christopher’s adult life, is a misfiring mishmash of fantasy hooks and the Mouse’s ever-overarching theme of returning oneself to childhood (where, presumably, one would be forever in thrall with Disney properties and pay for them accordingly).
It opens with a young Christopher Robin (Orton O’Brien), at a banquet to say goodbye on his last day with his furry friends in Hundred Acre Wood before leaving for boarding school. There attending is Pooh (Jim Cummings, whose voice sounds uncannily like that of famous previous Disney Pooh-voice Sterling Holloway), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Eeyore (Brad Garrett, inexplicably American), Tigger (Cummings, again, using an American accent that perhaps is a bit more deserved), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo), Roo (Sara Sheen), and Owl (Toby Jones), in one
last feast.
Flash forward 30 years, via time-lapse editing over the credits, and a now exceedingly adult Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) has married — um, not his cousin, apparently — a kindly woman named Evelyn (Hayley Atwell), and has a young daughter, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), who very much adores her oft-busy dad, and desperately wants to see more of him.
Christopher, having found employment as the director of efficiency at a luggage company, never has time enough for his family, leaving his daughter angry and sad, and his wife disappointed in him. Adding to the pressure, Christopher’s boss (Mark Gatiss), a foppish clod, has demanded he cut costs over the weekend by whacking staff, when he was meant to go away to his parents’ old country estate with his family. Unable to leave with them, to their consternation, Christopher resigns himself to spending the weekend alone in the office, but is interrupted by a lost Pooh bear, who has come to London via
a secret magic passageway, in hopes of finding his old comrade and having him help find all his other friends, who have mysteriously vanished.
The two embark on a brief adventure, with Christopher Robin mostly attempting to get Pooh back to the Hundred Acre Wood as soon as possible in order to get back to work at the office, but eventually he succumbs, at least partially, and returns to the magical forest himself to help his old furry comrade.
Eventually, of course, his daughter gets involved, and the whole crew ends up in London on a madcap shuffle, trying to help Christopher Robin from being eaten by a woozle (whom the animal crew believes his boss to be), and saving his job in the process.
You can certainly see what Disney wants you to come away with from this experience: You are never fully grown up, and you must only listen to your heart — or the soft voice of your young child — to recapture the spirit of your youth. That this lesson, time and again, is being rammed down our throats by one of the more powerful media conglomerates in the world — and poised to achieve full-omniscient level with its recent acquisition of Fox — always feels disingenuous (a repeating point I’ve tiresomely noted over the years, I realize), but here, completely making up a story about the sad Christopher Robin character reclaiming his lost youth and embracing the idea of family at the same
time, it becomes particularly galling.
Ironically, one imagines this Frankenmonster hybrid would have been most uniformly condemned by Milne (who died in 1956), and his son (who died in 1996), for not only further exploiting the Milne literary legacy, but presenting an utterly false version of his son, at the same time as serving to further put a version of him squarely in the public eye. Disney has shown little restraint in the past in re-creating real events in its own best interests — its ham-handed and self-serving version of Walt himself in Saving Mr. Banks as but one recent example — but, as always, the shamelessness of its pitch is draped over by its cloying, up-with-people messaging, like a warm syrup over a pile of Brillo pads.
For whatever reason, at the afternoon press screening I attended, large squadrons of children from nearby camps kept streaming in long after the film began, noisily getting their seats and whispering and scuffling among themselves. At first it was an annoying distraction, but I came to see it as a sort of proper rebuke to the sanitized Disney version of childhood it is so quick to laud: These kids were unruly and loud, and only half-interested, which they let everyone near them know. The perfect audience for a movie lacking any genuine conviction, trying to be everything to everyone: Few of its intended young audience members wanted much of anything to do with it.