Goodbye Christopher Robin * (2017, Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Will Tilston, Stephen Campbell Moore, Kelly Macdonald) – Movie Review 

Simon Curtis’s real-life biopic drama about children’s author A A Milne and his creation of the Winnie the Pooh stories inspired by his son Christopher Robin Milne means well but it is largely miscalculated, misjudged, mismanaged and a quite frightful film.

Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie are miscast and struggling as First World War-traumatised Alan Milne and his hedonistic, selfish, often absent wife Daphne. As the six or eight-year-old Christopher Robin, Will Tilston looks like the Annabelle doll, giving rise to the idea that he would be great as Damien in the next Omen remake. I’m guessing that is a long way from what was intended.

If all three are miscast, Robbie is by far the worst. She is terrible. Dublin-born Gleeson is just all wrong as the horribly, tooth-achingly English Milne. Gleeson looks and acts like a young David Warner, but not as good. Tilston is a moppet. He’d make a good Little Lord Fauntleroy too, if anyone fancied a remake of that. All three actors proceed as though they think their performances are charming.

A little confidence can usually take you anywhere, but not here. The performances are dead ends, going nowhere. Stephen Campbell Moore has something of the same trouble as the only other significant character, Ernest. He gets nowhere either. A few years back, he would have been cast as Milne, and he might have been very good.

The one bright spark in the acting is the admirable Kelly Macdonald as the nanny Olive, with whom Christopher Robin forms an unbreakable bond, understandably with a kid with such peculiar and unsatisfactory parents. She quietly lights up every scene she is in with her dignified performance.

The main trouble with the film, though, is not the acting or the actors, but that it doesn’t have a feature film story to tell. Sure, it has a few ideas to scatter around, a few thoughts, and a few facts. The are interesting but I would rather have gleaned them from Wikipedia. Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan’s screenplay struggles to stand straight and tall but falls down. It too wants to be charming, but charisma is apparently in short supply these days. Some of the scenes and dialogue are simply hollow and just plain don’t work.

Eventually, Christopher Robin becomes aged 18, and goes to fight in World War Two, and he is now played by Alex Lawther. He is a good actor too, and gets nowhere either in his two or three little scenes. The lad feels his dad has somehow betrayed him by publishing their private bear/ tiger world into the public arena, turning him into a celebrity. That is a fascinating idea, but it remains just an idea.

I saw this at the Odeon Covent Garden on the Saturday afternoon, the day after it opened. I imagined a big crowd in the cinema, with many kids enjoying themselves. Isn’t Goodbye Christopher Robin a kids’ film? Or, rather, isn’t it a family film? Yet there were eight of us in the cinema and not one child or teenager.

After the movie, as its closing credits rolled, a woman approached me.

‘Did you like it?’ she asked.

‘No, it was frightful,’ I replied.

‘I loved it. It tells exactly what happened to Christopher Robin.’

‘Well I’m glad it is faithful to the real story and that you liked it.’

‘Yes, I loved it.’

So there.

By the way, this is the second British film release this week with a heroine named Daphne. How odd is that?

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review 

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com