Good­bye Christo­pher Robin

If AA Milne had actu­al­ly man­aged to write his intend­ed mag­num opus about The Great War then there would have been no Win­nie the Pooh. What we learn from this sol­id lit­er­ary biopic is that he set out to deliv­er a wor­thy tome reflect­ing his trau­mat­ic World War One expe­ri­ences and vision for future world peace, but got crip­pling writer’s block when faced by the scale of the task.

Instead, he low­ered his sights and knocked out a mood-alter­ing bit of fluff instead, cap­tur­ing the wood­land adven­tures of his small son’s soft toys – a hon­ey-lov­ing bear, boun­cy tiger, dinky piglet and so on. Great news, in the end, for sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of ear­ly-years read­ers, who’ve tak­en their first steps in to the won­der­ful world of books via ​‘Win­nie the Pooh’ and ​‘The House at Pooh Cor­ner’, and a major pay­day, of course, for Milne himself.

The star­tling reveal in the movie how­ev­er, is that all this suc­cess wasn’t such a ter­rif­ic deal for his son Christo­pher Robin, who spent much of his child­hood doing inter­views and PR appear­ances in ser­vice of the books’ con­sid­er­able US sales – then had an even worse time of it when he went to board­ing school and got mer­ci­less­ly bul­lied when his class­mates found out exact­ly who he was.

Over­all, it’s a film that’s as unset­tled in its sto­ry­telling as it is unset­tling in its mate­r­i­al, and if it feels that they nev­er quite knocked the script into shape, it’s still a wel­come sur­prise when some­thing which looks very much like grey-pound cat­nip is spiked with some­thing rather more bit­ter. Pooh-sticks will nev­er quite be the same again.

There’s a resent­ful under­tow here, which is fas­ci­nat­ing, and per­haps not what you’d expect, but does rather play against direc­tor Simon Cur­tis’ her­itage Eng­land visu­als which cap­ture bucol­ic coun­try­side and posh folk at their tweedy leisure, all done over in sun-dap­pled light to the strains of a pas­toral string-laden score (the great Carter Bur­well on a bit of an off-day).

You could give the film the ben­e­fit of the doubt, since the unthreat­en­ing Nation­al Trust vibe per­haps acts as a lure for the audi­ence, before slip­ping them some­thing tougher and dark­er than antic­i­pat­ed. Yet the facts them­selves, illu­mi­nat­ing though they are, present their own issues when it comes to find­ing an emo­tion­al cen­tre for the nar­ra­tive. We start out root­ing for Domh­nall Gleeson’s slight­ly stuffy Milne senior, for instance, as he strug­gles with post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der and seems to take gen­uine com­fort in the world of the ​‘Pooh’ sto­ries, yet he soon proves a shock­ing­ly unsym­pa­thet­ic par­ent, and Mar­got Robbie’s brit­tle, self-absorbed wife and moth­er is even more of a hor­ror show.

View­er dis­en­gage­ment looms, but thank­ful­ly there’s Kel­ly McDon­ald to save the day as the sen­si­ble, decent, Scot­tish nan­ny who says all the right things, but is also unde­ni­ably periph­er­al to the action. Mean­while dim­ple-cheeked, sick­en­ing­ly cute Will Tilston does a ster­ling job as the young Christo­pher Robin, but the char­ac­ter real­ly only has the matu­ri­ty to com­ment on his sit­u­a­tion when sub­se­quent­ly played as a trou­bled teen by Alex Lawther.