Winnie and ‘Christopher Robin’ shine despite script problems
Almost (but not quite) everyone loves A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh.”
Dorothy Parker, in her Constant Reader book column in the New Yorker, observed that “to speak against Mr. Milne puts one immediately in the ranks of those who set fire to orphanages.” But “House at Pooh Corner” — specifically, when Pooh says he added “tiddely pom” to make one of his songs “more hummy” — most provoked her:
“It is that word ‘ hummy,’” she wrote in her legendary 1928 review, “that marks the first place in ‘ The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
What drove Mrs. Parker over the edge was Milne’s hypocorisma (my new favorite word) — the use of pet names or baby talk, with lisps and cute spellings, to render a child’s voice. But the most surprising critic of Winnie and his little human pal Christopher Robin was Christopher Robin himself.
Director Simon Curtis’ biopic at hand is squarely situated in The Fathers and Sons Department, exploring the magical but problematic relationship between author Alan Alexander Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) and the boy (Will Tilston) whose stuffed-animal friends inspired a worldwide literary phenomenon.
Milne pere was a contributing editor at Punch, the leading British humor magazine, before joining the British Army in World War I and as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, being injured in the horrendous Battle of the Somme. After returning home and recuperating, he became a successful West End playwright and serious cricket enthusiast (playing on an amateur team alongside fellow authors J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle!).
What he wants now is to write the definitive pacifist book against war — excoriating the aristocrats who led 10 million people to the slaughter. But his publishers want something humorous
and marketable: “Find something to be happy about.”
Recurring bouts of what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder prompt him to seek a quieter place to live and write — against the will of his wildly social wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) — in the forest of rural Sussex, where their only child Christopher Robin Milne is born.
His parents’ detached, hands-off attitude leave the boy’s attention, affection and companionship largely to nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald). But A.A. — on his betterdays — walks with his son in the woods and comes to know Winnie (the Canadian bear named Winnipeg), Tigger, Piglet, Kanga and Roo, gamely inviting them to the dinner table and, soon enough, incorporating them into stories.
The first appeared in 1925, quickly followed by three volumes of Winnie and Christopher adventures that dominate the best-seller lists then — and thereafter. Those enchanting tales bring comfort to an England much in need of it after “the war to end all wars.” The Milne family is swept up in the huge international success, but at the cost of their own comfort — and Christopher’s own enchantment.
Mr. Gleeson is quite good: Not just his upper lip but everything about him is stiff, yet he periodically melts to the boy’s poignant attempts to loosen him up. The real star is young Will as Christopher (he prefers to be called Billy Moon), who doesn’t “act” cute. He has no need to. He is just astonishingly cute to look at, with his gigantic eyes, perfectly round face, bowl-head thick hair, spacey teeth and naturally androgynous grace of movement: playful, joyous, vulnerable and sad, all at the same time.
Ms. Robbie (of “Suicide Squad” fame) is sooo beautiful and sooo un-1920s- looking. Scriptwriters Frank Boyce and Simon Vaughan’s one-dimensional character creation does her no favors: She tells nanny Olive (warmly and wonderfully played by Ms. Macdonald) that the saddest thing about the war is so many women like Olive will never get married because so few men are left.
A much bigger script problem is the visually daring but jarring time jump from Christopher’s childhood to adulthood, at boarding school, and the bad miscasting of Alex Lawther, who lacks any physical or personality resemblance to the little boy we’ve fallen in love with. The subsequent, too-tidy third act is unconvincing, at best.
But it is all so beautifully photographed, with a surreal snow scene in which the flakes drift up as well as down, and impeccable production values, highlighted by lovely drawings-cum-animations of Christopher and Winnie at play.
Can the son forgive the parents for exploiting him? See for yourself. Suffice to say, he never took a penny of the vast fortune the Winnie books made.