Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Goodbye, Christopher Robin (Movie Review by Bob Racine)


1 hr & 47 min. color, 2017

Are the following proper names familiar to you: Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Joey, Winnie Bear?  Of course you may know the bear’s identity better as “Winnie the Pooh”, who gives the name to the famous bestseller by A.A. Milne.  This movie tells us the fact-based tale of how it came to be under the inspiration of the author’s small son Christopher Robin (Will Tilston).  Milne, whose nickname is Blue, is played by Domnhall Gleeson as a young veteran of World War I struggling with what we today call PTSD, known then as Shell Shock, who wishes to use his writing skill to create a book that will help heal England’s postwar wounds and restore it to a measure of health.  But instead of a treatise of adult instruction he comes forth with the children’s book with which the western world is quite familiar.       

Blue discovers the attachment his son, his only child, enjoys to stuffed animals, and father and son give names to them, animals they play with until Blue is hooked on them as well.  The book he writes turns out to be what will become the most beloved children’s illustrated book of all time.  The family of three – father, mother and son become over time quite famous, but success leads to excessive exposure of Christopher to the public, one that the boy finds exciting at first but eventually confuses him.

No, this is not altogether a happy tale.  The decision of the English-bred Blue, previously an urban creator of plays and short writings, to move to a rural home in Sussex is not greeted by his wife Agatha (Margo Robbie) with much joy.  He seeks out the quiet of the countryside to escape the oppression of the city where there are so many sights and sounds that trigger his memory of the battlefield, never imagining that his writing will take the turn it eventually does.  Agatha, so seemingly strong, lively and playful, turns out to be rather fragile.  She suffers a crisis of her own over the fact that her baby is not a girl.  The most bizarre scene in the movie is one in which the baby Christopher is lying on a bed crying his heart out.  Blue traces the sound of the weeping to the baby lying alone while the mother stands at a window ignoring him and brooding over the fact that her child is a boy and not the girl she wanted.  She had hoped against all hope that she would never again have to have a male member of her family go off to war with her wondering if he will ever return.  She rebels and leaves Blue and the boy’s nanny alone with Christopher for long periods while visiting in the city with friends and other family, demanding that her husband bring forth the book he claims he has in him before she will agree to resume her role as wife, mother and mistress of the manor.  

Despite the cloud of tension and uncertainty that hangs over the unstable family’s heads, the film does treat us to some lovely scenes of father and son making discoveries together.  Christopher virtually invades the solitude that the reclusive Blue craves for himself.  Their time together takes on a serene quality.  But then the film raises the question of how much notoriety a small child can endure.  It comes to the point, after the book’s success and Agatha has returned to Sussex, that everywhere father, son and mother go they are recognized and swamped by crowds of autograph seekers and admirers.  The child is turned into a celebrity and it takes time for the parents to wake up to what they are doing. 

The individual who wakes them is the nanny whose name is Olive (Kelly Macdonald) assigned to Christopher’s care; the boy calls her Nou.  She is forbidden by the customs of the time to speak her mind, but she is fully aware of the internal struggle Christopher is having and his need of personal affection and being cared for.  It takes some drastic circumstances for her to arrive at the point where she breaks the taboo and jolts father and mother awake and at considerable cost to herself. She comes off as a very strong, sensitive and intelligent woman who plays a big part in Christopher’s maturing process.    

Is there a thin line between devoted affection and systemic exploitation?  Sounds strange, does it not?  But how much notoriety can a small child endure?  And that exploitation can be unintended.  The last chapter in the tale has Christopher confronting his father hard, the father who has been quite clueless.  “I wanted you to write a book for me, not about me.”  This transpires as he too like his father enters the armed services when World War II breaks out over two decades later (through Blue’s intervention upon the son’s request).  Here the grown-up kid (played henceforth by a young actor named Alex Lawther) has lost much of his innocence from spending some years in a boarding school where he has known considerable bullying.  Upon his departure to the front he takes an inconspicuous name in the hopes that he can live as an ordinary person unidentified as Christopher Robin and leaves his father feeling crushed.  What happens thereafter has some of the makings of an unexpected miracle, but I will not give that away.

The film is good, but it could have been better.  There are interludes that beg for more detail.  The delivery of Christopher to his boarding school is made to look unbelievably easy.  This kid has been a nature lover and a boy afloat in his own imagination.  How does Blue get him oriented to take on the rigors of that new life?  I should think Christopher would have put up some resistance to that quantum leap.  But we are not given even a clue about that.

Just as mysterious is the inevitable crisis Agatha must have gone through when her worst nightmare comes true, namely, her son going off to the battlefield.  We see so little of her once the older Christopher appears on the scene.  If she took off before, when her son was small, what was there to keep her from bolting the country manor altogether and maybe for good when that dark fear became a reality?  What has stabilized her during the interim?  The director Simon Curtis and his writers Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Simon Vaughn treat their material as if it is largely about the father and son.  The mother should have been given greater attention.  

But the story did have a bit of a mesmerizing effect upon me.  The painterly Sussex countryside is generously on display, right from the film’s opening shot.  There is victory in the final analysis, but nothing like the kind for which Blue was hoping, not even after the publishing success.  The scenery is easy and pleasing to absorb.  A child’s world does come to life in a measure.  And, as I have already intimated, it does open the door for deep discussion about the perils of a child’s celebrity.  I only wish it had shaped up into a more well-rounded and complex family drama.  It settles for much less than it could have been.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Movie Review by Bob Racine)


This blog has been in operation since March 2012.  As an observance of its sixth anniversary, I am doing something I have never done before: I am republishing my review of a 2011 movie I featured shortly afterward in the spring of 2012. My wife Ruby and I recently checked it out from Netflix as a supplement to the book on which it is based and which she had started reading, unaware that I had seen the film and written about it.  We were both so deeply moved by the viewing, I even more so than before, that I could not resist the urge to rerun it.  Over the years it has lost none of its magnetic appeal.  The following is word for word what appeared in that 2012 issue.   

The movie industry has learned how, after the better part of a century, to get convincing performances out of children.  They seem to get better and better in fact with time.  Here we have that rare instance of a child not only creating a viable and strong character but one who virtually carries the entire picture, something just any child actor could not be counted upon to do, however talented and well trained.  Two thumbs up and high fives for the casting department!

His name is Thomas Horn.  Except for one interlude of just a few minutes duration, the entire story is told from the point of view of his elementary school age boy named Oskar, brilliant beyond his years, an IQ almost off the charts.  We are locked into his state of mind and see things through his eyes.  Each happening he witnesses, each stimulus to which he is exposed, each crisis he incurs is processed by his criteria alone.  There is no overview, no commentary, no narration but his.  And yet I walk away feeling far more wise and enlightened than when I started. 

Whatever the movie’s title refers to, it most fittingly describes the boy.  At first you are likely to feel greatly affronted by his brash, in-your-face personality and imagination, his raw antagonism, his screaming fits and cunning devices.  He is a kid who is so intelligent that he imagines all kinds of dangers and threats that the average person would take in stride – rides on subways, swinging on playground swing sets, even crossing busy streets, etc.  He is obsessed over safety.  His loving father (Tom Hanks) once had him examined for possible Asperger’s Disease, something that afflicts “people who are smarter than anyone else but can’t run straight.”  Actually he is just an unusually gifted child whose imagination works overtime.  Yes, he will be an affront at first.  But I suggest you follow and stick with him on his tumultuous journey.  Believe me, there are immeasurable rewards awaiting you for your persistence. 

Such a journey could prove gripping in any set of depicted circumstances, but what makes this [Oscar nominated] screen gem so remarkable is the fact that the kid must take on nothing less than the disaster of 9/11, which claims the life of that beloved father and mentor and turns his personal universe on its head with almost shattering force.  He finds himself chosen by fate to be the last person to hear his father’s voice on the telephone answering machine before the World Trade tower in which the father is trapped collapses into a mountain of rubble on the TV screen.  Such a tragedy would be more than enough for any child, but for a youngster who already lives in fear of risk, disquieted by the noise and stridency of life in his native Manhattan and fanatically attached to the notion that there must be a scientific explanation for everything, the trauma and challenge are nothing short of colossal.  The question posed is how a child such as Oscar can work through this unearthly horror on his own terms.

What helps him is the discovery of a key among his father’s possessions, one that he believes his Dad has left him as an incitement to the kind of inquiry on which he thrives.  His extensive, frantic and at times panicky search all over the city for the lock into which the key fits constitutes the main body of the tale, a search that leads to some astounding results.

There are three grownups who play a big part in helping him on his journey, all of them superbly portrayed without stealing the show.  (As I have said, the entire picture belongs to Thomas Horn.)  One is the father himself (Hanks), a jeweler, with a family history made blurry by the Second World War.  He takes his son on various “expeditions” without ever having to leave their neighborhood, pushing him just enough but not too fast and not too far at a time.  This is a father that just about any one of us would have been pleased to have had.  The almost perfect rapport between him and his son, so vividly portrayed, contributes enormously to the sense of shock and loss we share with Oscar after the 9/11 tragedy.  Then there is his mother (Sandra Bullock), a working woman who is tested almost beyond the limits of her sanity over her husband’s death and her son’s extremely furious rebellion.  She must gather up all her inner resources to take on the role of a single, widowed parent.  She must find a way at last to penetrate the bewildering mind of her son, a mind the father knew how to connect with so astutely.  And finally, Oscar has a most unusual encounter with an elderly mute man (Max von Sydow, brilliant as always) living in his grandmother’s apartment across the street.  The interplay of these two decades-apart characters provides us with the film’s choicest moments of humor and moves the story toward its eventual resolution. 

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a marvel of directing by Stephan Daldry and scripting by Eric Roth from a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.  There are harsh segments to be gotten through; the film demands much of us emotionally speaking, but before it is all over the quality of mercy flows in many directions, back and forth, up and down and sideways.  It keeps snug company with “Hugo” in extolling a child’s yen for discovery.   If you missed it upon its original 2011 release, rent the DVD now and enjoy the treat.  It is available from Netflix.  If you saw it, rent it anyway and see it again. The encounter between Oscar and his mother in the closing minutes is worth its weight in gold.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.