Simon Curtis (2017)

Goodbye Christopher Robin follows Finding Neverland (2004) and Saving Mr Banks (2013) in the recent sequence of true-story-behind-the-children’s-classic biopics.   Although Simon Curtis’s A A Milne film is weaker than either of those predecessors, it finds itself in a bind similar to Saving Mr Banks:  how do you do justice to the writer’s largely unhappy situation without tarnishing the thoroughly jolly reputation of the much-loved literary work they created?   In the case of Mr Banks, the issue was complicated and more acute because Walt Disney was one of the main characters in the story and Walt Disney Productions were behind the movie.  No such conflict of interest impedes Goodbye Christopher Robin but the end product is impacted, mired in contradiction.  Simon Curtis makes the case that A A Milne, against his better judgment, got swept up in the huge popular success of his Winnie-the-Pooh stories in the late 1920s – that this runaway commercial enterprise effectively exploited and served to alienate his young son Christopher Robin.  The film, almost from the start, becomes virtually an illustration of the predicament for Milne père that it means to describe.  Curtis may well value his creative integrity.  He’s nevertheless required to come up with a piece of heritage British cinema with an eye on international markets, especially the American one.

Shafts of Edenic sunlight illuminate Ashdown Forest (the inspiration for Hundred Acre Wood), through which Milne (Domhnall Glesson) and Christopher Robin (Will Tilston) walk and talk and play Poohsticks.  Carter Burwell’s standard-issue score drips twinkly nostalgia.  Christopher Robin is incarnated by a round-cheeked, dimpled poppet.  These elements of the film are so blatantly designed-to-please that the thought crosses your mind that Simon Curtis could be using them as an ironic counterpoint to the predominantly miserable narrative.  That thought’s transit is rapid, however:  to all intents and purposes, the prettifying and the film’s (questionable) version of the truth operate in parallel.  The poppet makes for especially uncomfortable viewing.  Will Tilston is now ten; according to a recent interview in the Daily Telegraph, he’s small for his age and had to ‘change his voice and bearing to play the six-year-old Christopher’.  This overlooks the fact that the boy ages several years over the course of the story.   The real Christopher Robin was barely five when Pooh first appeared in print in late 1925 and the screen Christopher appears on the scene well before his father creates the famous bear.   Will Tilston plays him all the way through until Christopher starts boarding school, which he did at the age of thirteen.  It’s unclear whether the child’s unchanging look – the pudding-basin hairdo, perfectly bobbed, remains even after he’s graduated from nursery smocks – is meant to reflect a grotesque, commercially-driven retardation of Christopher Robin’s growing up, to suggest that he can’t be himself but only the public image of himself.  What’s undeniable is that it leaves a queasy sense that the child actor’s cuteness is being exploited.

Whether the screenplay, by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan, was negligent in the first place or has been subject to careless editing is hard to tell.  At the start of the film, Alan Milne, struggling to come to terms with his experiences as a soldier in the recently ended Great War, is solemnly determined to write a pacifist tract.   That’s the last we hear of it until the closing legends, which mention that Peace with Honour was published in 1934.   Milne’s wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) is portrayed first as a brittle socialite, who resents the family’s move from London to the Sussex countryside, then as an all-round bitch, greedily enjoying the fruits of Pooh and leaving the maternal side of things to Christopher’s nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald).  Daphne supposedly wanted a daughter rather than a son to avoid any risk of her child going to war yet she seems disappointed when World War II arrives and Christopher fails his army medical.  She pressures her husband to use his influence to get the authorities to change their mind and it seems that he does so.  When Christopher goes missing presumed dead she bitterly criticises Milne for doing what she urged him to do.  How this marriage survives is a mystery:  the Milnes appear to have nothing in common.  They don’t even get a we-must-stay-together-for-the-sake-of-the-child scene to explain things.

More crucially, how does Milne – independent-minded and far from biddable, wary of the trappings of easy success – get sucked into the Pooh industry and neglect the son he dearly loves?  If we’re meant to think it’s because he’ll do anything for the sake of Daphne, this doesn’t come through at all:  he seems utterly remote from her.  When Christopher is upset that Olive is going to abandon him by marrying, he refuses to get out of bed, insisting that ‘I won’t go to school today!’  There’s been no sign of him going to school any day up to this point:  it would have been interesting to see how an infant superstar of the 1920s got on with kids his own age.  Perhaps Simon Curtis felt this would lessen the melodramatic impact, when Christopher eventually goes to boarding school, of showing how the other boys hate his guts and bully him (‘Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs …’)

Domhnall Gleeson unwisely attempts a portrait of A A Milne that’s uncompromising and penetrating – qualities signally lacking in the script.  Without the material to go deeper into character, Gleeson is merely glum and standoffish and, most of the time, inexpressive – he isn’t able to dramatise Milne’s remoteness or inner conflicts.  Margot Robbie is relatively in tune with the negative writing of the part of Daphne but the result of that is predictably disagreeable.  This is a material girl with no sense of fun.  Robbie’s cut-glass English accent is precarious.  Kelly Macdonald does a decent job of Olive although the script is as simplistically sympathetic towards nanny as it’s hostile to Daphne.  The Great War flashbacks and their traumatic legacy for Alan Milne and his friend Ernest (E H) Shepard are perfunctory but Stephen Campbell Moore manages to give Shepard, illustrator of both Pooh books as well as the When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six collections, a bit of individuality.  The same is true, with even less to work with, of the reliably entertaining Vicki Pepperdine, as a bicycling  postwoman.

In the aforementioned Telegraph piece, arts correspondent Hannah Furness is at pains to stress Will Tilston’s ordinariness:  he’s been ‘propelled from playing the donkey in his state school nativity play to one of the hotly-tipped future talents of the British film industry’.    Her interviewee rather puts paid to Furness’s efforts when he describes his reaction to learning that he’d landed the role  of Christopher Robin:   ‘I was so excited I ran downstairs and jumped in my auntie’s pool with my pyjamas on.’   At his age, it can’t have been a paddling pool.  Will Tilston has a stage-school sheen and eagerness but Simon Curtis fails to bring anything out of him:  Tilston switches moods proficiently but superficially.  The boy Christopher Robin is replaced by a young man in the course of the bullying sequence at (what was actually) Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.  From this point onwards, the story gets briefly more interesting because Will Tilston turns into Alex Lawther.

It’s true that this piece of casting sustains the worrying arrested-development theme:  although he’s in his early twenties, Alex Lawther looks much younger; his voice is so light-coloured as to sound unbroken.  He’s a proper actor, though.  As the schoolboy Alan Turing, he was the best thing in The Imitation Game.  The scene between him and Domhnall Gleeson, in a station buffet – as Christopher prepares to go off to war and reproaches his father for, in effect, hijacking his boyhood and selfhood – is the dramatic highlight of Goodbye Christopher Robin.  The competition for that accolade isn’t keen but Lawther gives the exchange an emotional urgency and rawness that cuts through the prevailing awkward artificiality of the film.  He brings to life the extreme oddity of Christopher Milne’s identity.  This is a boy who should have been a girl (and who, as his schoolboy persecutors jeer, looks like one).  Although he was given the birth names Christopher Robin, his parents and nanny always called him ‘Billy Moon’ – this must have reinforced his sense of his actual name being only a kind of stage name.  (Christopher’s nickname for his father, unexplained unless I missed it, is, appropriately enough, Blue.)  The missing-in-action Christopher turns out to be alive and well and, according to the screen tradition of returning from the dead, arrives unannounced at the family home to give his nearest and dearest a big surprise.  He then tells his father what Winnie-the-Pooh meant to his fellow soldiers; realising this has been enough to convince Christopher that A A Milne not only meant well but did a great thing in writing the immortal books.  Alex Lawther can’t do much with this pat (and, in terms of historical accuracy, misleading) reconciliation scene.  But I’ll look forward to seeing what he does next, in the first instance as Tibby Schlegel in the upcoming BBC dramatisation of Howards End (with a screenplay by Kenneth Lonergan).

Although Simon Curtis encourages the audience mentally to tick off the Pooh references and resonances as these occur, it’s worth noting that this film is highly unsuitable for children.   The certificate warns only of ‘mild war violence’ but the themes, in spite of being poorly realised, are more variously upsetting – failure to love or to show love within a family, the loss or even theft of childhood.   The emphasis is on the Pooh tales to the virtual exclusion of Milne’s poems – perhaps inevitable but still surprising for this viewer, who enjoyed Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner but on whom When We Were Very Young made a deeper impression.  (It’s the only book I still have from early childhood.)  Stultified in the country and annoyed that their move there isn’t helping Milne to get writing and earning, Daphne Milne temporarily returns to London.  This estrangement from her husband and son is presented as the real-life basis of ‘Disobedience’[1].  The effect of knowing this is hardly one of disenchantment.  Even on first acquaintance with the poem (when I was four or five), I found it very worrying.

3 October 2017

[1] ‘James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree/Took great/Care of his Mother,/Though he was only three./James James/Said to his Mother,/”Mother,” he said, said he;/”You must never go down to the end of the town, if/you don’t go down with me.” ’  (Etc)