The dark story behind childhood classic

EVERYONE grew up with the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin and the Hundred Acre Wood. But not everything was rosy behind the scenes.

EVEN if you’re not particularly fond of children, the kid actor, Will Tilston, that plays the young Christopher Robin is cuteness personified. And if you do like kids, well, God help you.

All rosy cheeks, precocious wisdom and a haunting sadness, Tilston’s portrayal of Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne’s son, will tug at the coldest heartstrings.

Inspired by the relationship between Milne and his young son (his family calls him Billy Moon), Goodbye Christopher Robin is one of those movies that, if it was contemporary and a tad more on the nose, it would’ve closed out with Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” or Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son”.

As it is, you’re probably already struggling to see the end credits through the blur of tears — albeit, somewhat manipulated tears because, as always, it’s the cloying, rising score that gets you.

Winnie-the-Pooh before there was a Winnie-the-Pooh.

An extremely British period film full of dialogue like “bad show”, “jolly good idea” and “tinkety tonk”, the solid Goodbye Christopher Robin is a perfectly amiable and beautifully filmed semi-biopic. That it has Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Macdonald and Margot Robbie as the adult leads is to its credit. As you’d expect, all the performances are excellent.

It will also have you digging around your storage area, sifting through boxes for your Winnie-the-Pooh books, though the beloved tales of childhood adventure have a much darker pall over them now.

In the post-World War I era, A.A. Milne, then a noted satirist and playwright, is one of the many young men who returned from the war with shellshock — what we now know as PTSD. A champagne cork popping and the buzzing of flies send him back to the horrors of the front.

Constantly triggered by the cacophonous sounds of London, he moves his family — wife Daphne (Robbie), son Billy and nanny Olive (Macdonald) to a country house at the edge of the Ashdown Forest.

Milne and Daphne aren’t the most attentive of parents, leaving Billy to be raised by Olive. Daphne misses the bustle of London and Milne is suffering from writer’s block as he tries to compose an anti-war treatise.

Don’t you just want to pinch those little cheeks?

When Milne suddenly finds himself alone, for the first time, with his son, the pair set off for adventures in the woods with Billy’s toys. The first time you see Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and Piglet having a little tea party is a moment to make you smile.

Inspired by the idyllic childhood of his son, Milne decides to put the animals and his child in a story, a story that proves to be wildly popular and makes an international celebrity out of six-year-old Billy.

Goodbye Christopher Robin, directed by Simon Curtis, turns a little darker when it shifts into the back half of the movie, dealing with the toll Billy is put through under the public eye. Endless signings, meet-and-greets and interviews exhaust Billy, who can’t understand why his parents are parading him around. With the constant demands on the tyke, his bright-eyed innocence dims.

It’s the downside generations of Pooh fans never knew about, the emotional price a child never asked to pay. It may not be a grand tragedy, but sometimes it’s the mundane ones that mar lives.

Rating: 3/5

Goodbye Christopher Robin is in cinemas from today.

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