The honeyed sunlight streams through the leafy branches of Ashdown Forest, the setting and inspiration for A.A. Milne’s beloved Winnie-the-Pooh. In Goodbye Christopher Robin the idyllic woods is also the backdrop for emotional complications between Milne (Domhnall Gleeson); his wife, Daphne (Margot Robbie); their child, Christopher Robin (Will Tilston); and even their nanny (Kelly Macdonald). The series of children’s stories that grew out of their family and home in Ashdown Forest brought happiness to a world of readers and wealth to their author but mixed blessings to the Milnes.
Directed by Britain’s Simon Curtis with a “Masterpiece Theatre” sensibility for accurately reproducing an era in cars, clothes and home furnishings, Goodbye Christopher Robin sprints comfortably along from Milne’s harrowing World War I service in the trenches through his difficult adjustment to peacetime, his sometimes fraught relations with Daphne and his retreat to the woods where the muses eventually whispered like the wind in the tree branches. The screenplay veers between two poles, the innocence of childhood and the cruelty of adulthood. Milne, who experienced extreme cruelty under fire on the Western Front, left a legacy of nostalgia for innocence inevitably lost.
In the language of his day, he suffered from shell shock. Today, the disorder is called post-traumatic shock but under any name, it resulted in sporadic outbursts that left his boy understandably frightened. Even the sound of bees in the woods triggered memories of flies, big horrible things that infested the trenches and reminded him of combat. Meanwhile, Daphne, a cosmopolitan socialite, was drawn to the bright things of Jazz Age London. She carried their child and moved to the country to make her husband happy and, since he remained unhappy, she resented him.
Daphne abandoned husband and son for several months of nightlife. During that time the walks father and son took in the woods, their playtime with stuffed animals, grew into a web of names and associations that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. The boy and his dad led each other into a private world of imagination—beautifully rendered on screen—that the wider world soon would share.
When the books became bestsellers, the media sensation is a great lark for Daphne but Milne’s face registers dismay that the spotlight falls less on him than on his son, the child protagonist of the stories. The reality of their family life bends to serve the needs of a voracious press and a public hungry for sensation. Celebrity was fun at first for the boy but begins to weigh more heavily as the relentless machinery of marketing turns him into a show pony.
Although the popularity of Milne’s honey-devouring bear is never explained, and despite flourishes of melodrama, Goodbye Christopher Robin is an imaginative depiction of the creative process and the burden of popularity. The story’s whimsy carries the day, yet the film dares to show the scars hidden behind the cheery face of Winnie-the-Pooh.
