Goodbye Christopher Robin (Where the Bears of Society Growl)

 

Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) is a “British biographical drama film about the lives of Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne and his family, especially his son Christopher Robin.” (- Wikipedia). It was followed closely by the Disney film Christopher Robin (2018), dealing with the later life of the fictional Christopher Robin; the two are sometimes confused.

How I got my copy of the DVD is rather unusual. I had posted a Facebook memory, showing a list from four years ago of the items on my Amazon Wish List that I most wanted at the time. I noted that I had them all now except for Goodbye Christopher Robin. John’s mother-in-law answered that she had an unopened copy that she wasn’t going to watch, and that she would send it with John the next time he came over. Within a week I had my copy.

I must admit that I had tried to watch versions of the film on YouTube before, but had found them plagued with skips, distortions, and blank spots, all the usual alterations engineered to make their posting ‘legal’ by ‘publishers’. I found them unacceptable after the first ten minutes. When I put the DVD on, I found that it too suffered a bit from performance problems, although how much of that was inherent to the disc and how much to my player I can’t tell. But I did finally manage a complete viewing.

After author A. A. Milne returns from World War One, he finds it hard to produce the kind of light-hearted whimsy that was his expected métier before. But interaction with his young son Christopher Robin (called within the family ‘Billy Moon’; which he considers his ‘real’ and private name) and his toy animals helps him to relax and regain some ease with his life, and poems and stories begin to flow from his pen.

Things begin to go awry when Milne’s wife Daphne starts allowing the promotion of their son as a celebrity, ironically as the ‘real’ Christopher Robin, which ‘Billy’ sees as essentially a part to be played, and which begins to erode his genuine childhood. Daphne wants to secure the fame and security of her family but cannot see the toll it is having on the well-being of her son. When the boy’s beloved nanny weighs in with some pointed home truths, she is fired, leading to his deepening distress. Remorsefully, Milne vows never to write of Billy and his bear again.

The boy is sent to school where he suffers for being perceived as famous and privileged and for having been held up as the sentimental pattern of childhood to a whole generation. Eventually (much to the dismay of his parents, and with some bitterness, hoping to prove his individuality, worth, and maturity) he goes and fights in World War Two. He returns with a better understanding of his father, his achievements, and the place they both must now perforce occupy in the world and history, and that it is a place not without genuine merit for the human heart.

The movie now goes on the shelf with my other ‘literary biography’ DVDs, along with those of Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, P. L. Travers, Robert E. Howard, S. T. Coleridge, and even (on a more speculative spectrum) Mary Shelley and William Shakespeare. As I understand it, there has been another such film in the works for a while, about Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows.  I wonder when (or if) it will arrive? All I can say is that if it does, I’ll want to watch it.