Good look at the boy behind popular book

FOR CR Milne, the reallife boy behind a beloved children’s book character, the popularity of his father’s stories was a curse.

Screenwriters Frank Cottrellboyce and Simon Vaughan draw on his memoirs for Goodbye Christopher Robin, and though director Simon Curtis applies a heavy hand, he mostly avoids preciousness in the child’s-eye perspective.

It’s the chemistry between Domhnall Gleeson and newcomer Will Tilston, as the awkwardly matched father and son, that makes the movie more than a melange of inept parenting.

It’s also a story of the trauma of combat. Domhnall’s celebrated playwright AA Milne is a shellshocked veteran of World War

I’s trenches. Back in London society, his fervent antiwar pronouncements make him a buzzkill at soirees.

When a popped champagne cork or opening-night spotlight triggers flashbacks, he does his best to maintain a stiff upper lip.

But the illustrator EH Shepard (Stephen Campbell Moore), a fellow vet and Punch contributor who would become Milne’s collaborator on the Winnie-thepooh books, notices his friend’s jangled nerves and quietly does what he can to calm him.

Not so Milne’s wife, Daphne (Margot Robbie), who insists that “if you don’t think about dreadful things, they cease to exist”.

As the movie’s villain of sorts, the excellent Robbie is cheerfully tactless, a party girl who’s married as much to Milne’s ambition and stature as she is to the man.

Her stylish dresses reflect not just the crème de la crème of 1920s chic but her need to be a part of it. Although bored by her husband’s determination to take a break from West End comedies and do something serious, she agrees to move to the country with him and their son (Tilston), officially named Christopher Robin but known as Billy Moon.

Daphne sticks it out in England’s south-east until she can no longer abide Milne’s lack of productivity or resist the siren call of the capital.

It’s the attention to the ways that Billy is as watchful and wary as he is hungry for paternal affection that makes the father-son exchanges compelling.

Though he’s not immune to outbursts of childish jealousy, Billy is an old soul with a knack for empathy, skilfully talking his war-damaged father out of his occasional panic attacks.

How something so intimate became something that belonged to the world, and how Billy was called upon to play a role he despised – “the real Christopher Robin” – is the subject of the film’s oversimplified second half. – Hollywood Reporter