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.
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