LEIGH PAATSCH, National Film Critic, News Corp Australia
Network
November 22, 2017 1:50pm
GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN (PG)
Director: Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn)
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Will Tilston,
Kelly Macdonald.
Life as an open book closes down a family
While Winnie-the-Pooh is one of the most beloved children’s
book characters of all time, far less is known about his creator, the British
playwright and author A.A. Milne.
Needless to say, Goodbye Christopher Robin is looking to
fill in a lot of those blanks.
As this serious (often bordering on stern) biopic shows us,
Milne’s wistful lightness of touch as a writer came from quite a heavy place.
Suffering from an undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder
after serving as a soldier in World War I, Milne (played by Domhnall Gleeson)
keeps a careful emotional distance from his dissatisfied wife Daphne (Margot
Robbie) and their neglected young boy Christopher (nicknamed Billy).
Reacclimatizing to the bright lights, small talk and big
parties of London proves to be a frustrating task for Milne. However, Daphne
wants to be out amongst it as much as possible. A rift opens between a couple
who were never all that close to begin with.
Retreating to the countryside in a last-ditch attempt to
find some purpose in life, Milne strikes literary gold in the rare combination
of imagination and innocence pouring out of his son.
Caught up in his own dark thoughts, Milne had previously
failed to recognise the brightness of Billy. Father and son take long walks
across the fields and through the woods.
Talking as they wander through their idyllic surrounds, the
pair conjure soon-to-be-immortal figures such as Eeyore, Tigger and, of course,
Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time.
Most importantly, Billy becomes the inspiration for
Christopher Robin, the cherubic mainstay of the stories that soon catapult
Milne to fame and fortune.
Milne strikes literary gold in the rare combination of
imagination and innocence pouring out of his son.
Most unfortunately, the child is also used as a marketing
tool by publishers to promote his dad’s works. Reporters and photographers are
suddenly everywhere. Father and son will never again be as close as they were
when inspiration first took hold.
The lasting effects of these events on little Billy
(beautifully portrayed by newcomer Will Tilston) are what really concern the
movie, and poignantly shifts viewers into a reflective space they may not have
expected going in.
For reasons beyond their control, Milne and his wife were
what can only be termed cold of heart, and it was their only child who bore the
brunt of the chill.
By all reports, it did not thaw until well into his adult
life, and even then, never completely so.
With such an icy path to be navigated through Goodbye
Christopher Robin, viewers will definitely be drawn to the movie’s one pocket
of enduring warmth: Billy’s relationship with the woman who all but raised him,
his nanny Olive (a wonderful Kelly Macdonald).
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"I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for
immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this
world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next."
—A. A. Milne.
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Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London to parents
John Vine Milne, who was born in Jamaica, and Sarah Marie Milne (née
Heginbotham) and grew up at Henley House School, 6/7 Mortimer Road (now
Crescent), Kilburn, a small public school run by his father. One of his
teachers was H. G. Wells, who taught there in 1889–90. Milne attended
Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied on a
mathematics scholarship, graduating with a B.A. in Mathematics in 1903. He
edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine.
Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as
an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating
illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. He was commissioned into the 4th
Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 1 February 1915 as a second
lieutenant (on probation). His commission was confirmed on 20 December 1915. On
7 July 1916, he was injured while serving in the Battle of the Somme and
invalided back to England. Having recuperated, he was recruited into Military
Intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI7 (b) between 1916 and 1918. He
was discharged on 14 February 1919, and settled in Mallord Street, Chelsea. He
relinquished his commission on 19 February 1920, retaining the rank of
lieutenant.
After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace
with Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War with Honour. During
World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of fellow English
writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the
Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his
internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the light-hearted
broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an
act of near treason by cooperating with his country's enemy. Wodehouse got some
revenge on his former friend (e.g., in The Mating Season) by creating fatuous
parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories, and
claiming that Milne "was probably jealous of all other writers.... But I
loved his stuff."
Milne married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt in
1913 and their son Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920. In 1925, Milne
bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex.
During World War II, Milne was Captain of the British Home
Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row, insisting on being plain "Mr.
Milne" to the members of his platoon. He retired to the farm after a
stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid, and by August 1953
"he seemed very old and disenchanted." Milne died in January 1956, aged 74
After graduating from Cambridge in 1903, A. A. Milne
contributed humorous verse and whimsical essays to Punch, joining the staff in
1906 and becoming an assistant editor.
During this period he published 18 plays and three novels,
including the murder mystery The Red House Mystery (1922). His son was born in
August 1920 and in 1924 Milne produced a collection of children's poems When We
Were Very Young, which were illustrated by Punch staff cartoonist E. H.
Shepard. A collection of short stories for children A Gallery of Children, and
other stories that became part of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, were first
published in 1925.
Milne was an early screenwriter for the nascent British film
industry, writing four stories filmed in 1920 for the company Minerva Films
(founded in 1920 by the actor Leslie Howard and his friend and story editor
Adrian Brunel). These were The Bump, starring Aubrey Smith; Twice Two; Five
Pound Reward; and Bookworms. Some of these films survive in the archives of the
British Film Institute. Milne had met Howard when the actor starred in Milne’s
play Mr Pim Passes By in London.
Looking back on this period (in 1926), Milne observed that
when he told his agent that he was going to write a detective story, he was
told that what the country wanted from a "Punch humorist" was a
humorous story; when two years later he said he was writing nursery rhymes, his
agent and publisher were convinced he should write another detective story; and
after another two years, he was being told that writing a detective story would
be in the worst of taste given the demand for children's books. He concluded
that "the only excuse which I have yet discovered for writing anything is
that I want to write it; and I should be as proud to be delivered of a
Telephone Directory con amore as I should be ashamed to create a Blank Verse
Tragedy at the bidding of others."
Milne is most famous for his two Pooh books about a boy
named Christopher Robin after his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and various
characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named
Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed bear, originally named
"Edward," was renamed
"Winnie" after a Canadian black bear named Winnie (after Winnipeg),
which was used as a military mascot in World War I, and left to London Zoo
during the war. "The pooh" comes from a swan the young Milne named
"Pooh." E. H. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his
own son's teddy, Growler ("a magnificent bear"), as the model. The
rest of Christopher Robin Milne's toys, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger,
were incorporated into A. A. Milne's stories, and two more characters – Rabbit
and Owl – were created by Milne's imagination. Christopher Robin Milne's own
toys are now on display in New York where 750,000 people visit them every year.
The real stuffed toys owned by Christopher Robin Milne and
featured in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. They are on display in the New York
Public Library Main Branch in New York. Missing is Roo, who was lost when
Christopher Robin was very young.
The fictional Hundred Acre Wood of the Pooh stories derives
from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, South East
England, where the Pooh stories were set. Milne lived on the northern edge of
the forest at Cotchford Farm, 51.090°N 0.107°E, and took his son walking there.
E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many
of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books. The adult Christopher
Robin commented: "Pooh's Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical." Popular tourist locations at Ashdown Forest
include: Galleon's Lap, The Enchanted Place, the Heffalump Trap and Lone Pine,
Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place, and the wooden Pooh Bridge where Pooh and Piglet
invented Poohsticks.
Not yet known as Pooh, he made his first appearance in a
poem, "Teddy Bear," published in Punch magazine in February 1924 and
republished in When We Were Very Young. Pooh first appeared in the London
Evening News on Christmas Eve, 1925, in a story called "The Wrong Sort Of
Bees." Winnie-the-Pooh was
published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. A second
collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, was published in 1927. All four
books were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. Milne also published four plays in
this period. He also "gallantly stepped forward" to contribute a
quarter of the costs of dramatising P. G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress. The
World of Pooh won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.
The success of his children's books was to become a source
of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever
he pleased and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of
direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had
made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol J. M. Barrie) on
both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing
in The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by Raymond
Chandler for the implausibility of its plot). But once Milne had, in his own
words, "said goodbye to all that in 70,000 words" (the approximate
length of his four principal children's books), he had no intention of
producing any reworkings lacking in originality, given that one of the sources
of inspiration, his son, was growing older.
Another reason Milne stopped writing children's books, and
especially about Winnie-the-Pooh, was that he felt "amazement and
disgust" over the fame his son was exposed to, and said that "I feel
that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for
him. I do not want CR Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert."
In his literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very
Young verses had first appeared, Methuen continued to publish whatever Milne
wrote, including the long poem "The Norman Church" and an assembly of
articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne likened to a benefit night for
the author).
In 1930, Milne adapted Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in
the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall.The title was an implicit
admission that such chapters as Chapter 7, "The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn," could not survive translation to the theatre. A special
introduction written by Milne is included in some editions of Grahame's novel.
Milne and his wife became estranged from their son, who came
to resent what he saw as his father's exploitation of his childhood and came to
hate the books that had thrust him into the public eye. Marrying his first
cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt, distanced Christopher still further from his
parents – Lesley's father and Christopher's mother hadn't spoken to each other
for 30 years.
The rights to A. A. Milne's Pooh books were left to four
beneficiaries: his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the
Garrick Club. After Milne's death in 1956, one week and six days after his 74th
birthday, his widow sold her rights to the Pooh characters to Stephen
Slesinger, whose widow sold the rights after Slesinger's death to the Walt
Disney Company, which has made many Pooh cartoon movies, a Disney Channel
television show, as well as Pooh-related merchandise. In 2001, the other
beneficiaries sold their interest in the estate to the Disney Corporation for
$350m. Previously Disney had been paying twice-yearly royalties to these
beneficiaries. The estate of E. H. Shepard also received a sum in the deal. The
UK copyright on the text of the original Winnie the Pooh books expires on 1
January 2027; at the beginning of the year after the 70th anniversary of the
author's death (PMA-70), and has already expired in those countries with a
PMA-50 rule. This applies to all of Milne's works except those first published
posthumously. The illustrations in the Pooh books will remain under copyright
until the same amount of time has passed, after the illustrator's death; in the
UK, this will be on 1 January 2047. In the United States, copyright will not
expire until 95 years after publication for each of Milne's books first
published before 1978, but this includes the illustrations.
In 2008, a collection of original illustrations featuring
Winnie-the-Pooh and his animal friends sold for more than £1.2 million at
auction in Sotheby's, London. Forbes magazine ranked Winnie the Pooh the most
valuable fictional character in 2002; Winnie the Pooh merchandising products
alone had annual sales of more than $5.9 billion. In 2005, Winnie the Pooh
generated $6 billion, a figure surpassed by only Mickey Mouse.
Marking the 90th anniversary of Milne's creation of the
character, and the 90th birthday of Elizabeth II, in 2016 a new story sees
Winnie the Pooh meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The illustrated and audio
adventure is titled Winnie-the-Pooh Meets the Queen, and has been narrated by
actor Jim Broadbent. Also in 2016, a new character, a Penguin, was unveiled in
The Best Bear in All the World, which was inspired by a long-lost photograph of
Milne and his son Christopher with a toy penguin.
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A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard memorial plaque at Ashdown
Forest, East Sussex, the setting for Winnie the Pooh
A memorial plaque in Ashdown Forest, unveiled by Christopher
Robin in 1979, commemorates the work of A. A. Milne and Shepard in creating the
world of Pooh. Milne once wrote of Ashdown Forest: "In that enchanted
place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be
playing."
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Several of Milne's children's poems were set to music by the
composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied many times,
including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We Are Sixty. The
1963 film The King's Breakfast was based on Milne's poem of the same name.
An exhibition entitled "Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a
Classic" appeared at the V & A from 9 December 2017 to 8 April 2018.
Christopher Robin Milne was born at 11 Mallord Street,
Chelsea, London, at 8 a.m. on 21 August 1920, to author Alan Alexander Milne
and Daphne (née de Sélincourt) Milne. Milne speculates that he was an only
child because "he had been a long time coming." From an early age
Milne was cared for by his nanny, Olive Brockwell, for over eight years until
May 1930, when he entered boarding school. Milne called her Nou, and stated
"Apart from her fortnight's holiday every September we had not been out of
each other's sight for more than a few hours at a time", and "we
lived together in a large nursery on the top floor."
In 1925, Milne's father bought Cotchford Farm, near Ashdown
Forest in East Sussex. Though still living in London, the family would spend
weekends, Easter and summer holidays there. As Milne described it, "So there
we were in 1925 with a cottage, a little bit of garden, a lot of jungle, two
fields, a river and then all the green, hilly countryside beyond, meadows and
woods, waiting to be explored." The place became the inspiration for
fiction, with Milne stating "Gill's Lap that inspired Galleon's Lap, the
group of pine trees on the other side of the main road that became the Six Pine
Trees, the bridge over the river at Posingford that became Pooh-sticks
Bridge," and a nearby "ancient walnut tree" became Pooh's House.
His toys, Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, plus two invented characters, Owl and Rabbit,
came to life through Milne and his mother, to the point where his father could
write stories about them. Kanga and Tigger were later presents from his
parents.
Of this time, Milne states, "I loved my Nanny, I loved
Cotchford. I also quite liked being Christopher Robin and being famous."
When his nanny departed when he was aged 9, Milne's
relationship with his father grew. As he put it, "For nearly ten years I
had clung to Nanny. For nearly ten more years I was to cling to him, adoring
him as I had adored Nanny, so that he too became almost a part of me..."
When Milne eventually wrote his memoirs, he dedicated them
to Olive Brockwell, "Alice to millions, but Nou to me".
Of his time at boarding school, Milne says, "For it was
now that began that love-hate relationship with my fictional namesake that has
continued to this day."
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