Goodbye Christopher Robin

A movie about parenting and writing, and suggestions for a sequel

Talk about full circle.

This is a movie experience article, not a review. It is a biography about a fiction which affected reality, but the biography probably affected some realities too.

It isn’t all happy hundred acre wood! Some parts are a hundred percent horror.

This movie made me weep and there are parts of it which are just like horror. It reminded me of the Ramayana, where things are going along swimmingly in the forest but Ravana swoops down on Sita and then the war starts. So brace yourself when you hit play.

Why a sleepy biography about the author of a male bear with a woman’s name?

This movie should be seen by everybody who writes nonfiction. If a writer who is a parent, or one who writes everyday, hasn’t seen it, they are allowing their writing to miss the vegetable in the vegetable stew.

Alan A. Milne, the author of the Winnie The Pooh books, and his wife Daph, are parents to Christopher Robin Milne, also known as Billy Moon. Billy’s Nanny, Nou, is a central character.

If you watch this movie, and you write about your kid: Bare minimum: You will change the kid’s gender in fiction.

Characters in fiction take off from real life, and real life bleeds. As a well-fed and well-off “writer”, I wondered if it is ever worth it to write about one’s own family, and especially the children.

Yes, Indians watch English movies in English with English subtitles because your accents are funny to us, and the writing makes the movie’s easier to understand

In India, the English language movies have English subtitles, because we can read better than we can follow the spoken accent of the native speakers on screen.

Look for Britishisms like “cheer up, rubbish, blub”and “extraordinary notion”

I feel sorry for English people watching English movies. We get more out of an England made movie, than they could.

For example, when A.A. Milne says to Billy, “What an extraordinary notion”, we find it silly. Who would speak in such complicated English to a small child? Milne’s behaviour is almost funny. We think, “oh, those English with their stiff upper lips, they should loosen up a little”

The Nanny Nou character in the movie uses simpler English and treats the child like a child. Billy’s parents don’t.

The curious case of the rising snowflakes. Disclaimer: I have seen snow fall only on TV.

If you can make out the snowflakes on the screen – they move upwards. I wonder why snow would do that. In this scene Billy and his dad, who he calls Blue, are looking up at Owl’s house.

Milne has post-traumatic stress disorder and is a nervous wreck. He jumps even at the sound of a bursting balloon.

The illustrator draws the boy with his toys and that’s when lines between Billy and Christopher Robin blur and blend

Milne writes about his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and the illustrator draws the toys as well as the boy. The result is a commercial juggernaut that runs over the boy’s real childhood.

The two golden weeks in the hundred acre wood

Milne spends just two weeks being a real parent, when he goofs off with his son because the nanny is off duty.

It is during those two weeks that he decides to write a poem about Winnie the Pooh, the characters Tigger, Eyeore, Kanga, Roo, Piglet and Owl in the Hundred-acre Wood.

In India we never paid much attention to Christopher Robin. To us, the main character was always Pooh, and Christopher has long hair, so my children would ask if he was a girl.

A.A. Milne has PTSD but is calm when both maids quit. Now you know he’s crazy.

For someone with PTSD, Milne takes the news of the nanny’s absence go visit her ailing mother, at a time when the cook is also on holiday – rather well. Milne’s wife has already left in a huff, because Milne refuses to write anything.

The story of the breakfast Blue cooks

Milne says, to Nanny Nou, I’ll manage. Old soldier, you know. Then he cooks poor Billy the world’s lumpiest porridge and the world’s worst poached eggs.

Billy objects because the eggs aren’t in shells.

Milne tells Billy not to keep his knife and fork in that aggressive stance, and Billy angrily asks, Why not?

Milne answers, because if somebody were to fall through the ceiling, they would be impaled on your fork, and then they’d bleed out all over your eggs and ruin your breakfast.

Somehow this satisfies Billy and he eats his eggs as a concession to the hapless person who might fall through the ceiling.

Billy Moon is paraded around like a show pony and he hates it. Milne hates it too, because he expected himself, the author, to be hounded, not his child.

When the commercial part of the movie starts, everyone wants a piece of Christopher Robin. London and America want to meet the boy and he is invited into toy shops so that they can sell what Billy calls “fake” Winnie the Poohs. Billy’s bear is called Edward Bear, and Billie himself is called Billy Moon. In all his interviews, not once does Billy reveal his real name or that of Edward Bear.

A business mind Christopher Robin has not!

If Christopher Robin Milne, the boy, had a greedy or a commercial bone in his body, he would have enjoyed all the attention. He would have lapped it all up and demanded more. He would have used the money to fund his business dreams. Instead, he keeps withdrawing into himself and tries to draw lines between where fiction ends and real life begins.

As a parenting story, Goodbye Christopher Robin is full of stereotypes and black and white characters.

Daph is cruel, vapid, pragmatic and commercial. She’s the kind of mother Cinderella’s stepsisters would have made. No, I don’t think the real Mrs. Milne could have been that bad.

Margot Robbie, who plays Daph, the mom, is a dark character. She is flippant, and vapid, and treats Billy like a plaything who should never “blub”. She mentions twice in the movie, about how having the baby nearly killed her. In her defence, it probably nearly did. The biographer chose to paint Milne’s wife blacker than Milne himself.

Daph isn’t portrayed as wanting to spend a lot of time with Billy.

Billy’s time with Daph, his Mummy, is limited and segmented. Though Mummy does voices and buys the furry toys who eventually become the famous characters in the books, she is never shown as showing Billy more than a passing affection or genuine love.

In the movie’s ending scenes — no spoilers here — Margot Robbie finally gets to act out Daph as a nice person.

It is only in the movie’s penultimate scene where Margot Robbie can behave how a real mom would. Else, Margot Robbie’s Mummy character is as badly written as Margo in the Gerald Durrell books.

Daph has the best lines in the movie, considering that this is a biographical movie about her husband, the author. She says, “Writing a book against war is like writing a book against Wednesdays, which would come along even if you stayed in bed and protested them”.

Nanny Nou is the faerie who can do nothing wrong

Nanny Nou has a lovely accent which rises with the first syllable in the last word of each sentence as she speaks. I could hear that woman speak all day. She is the clean character in the story, the one who never does any wrong and never, ever loses it in front of Billy. I wish I had her temperament.

Nanny Nou resigns and cautions the parents against parading Billy around like a show pony

Nanny Nou’s first act upon resigning her post is to be rude to Daph. She tells her off for talking about how much the childbirth hurt, comparing her to a cow which can also give birth. She then persuades Milne and Daph to stop parading Billy around for interviews and toy shop appearances, peddling toys and books. Daph is awful to Nanny Nou, who’s real name is Olive, throughout the movie.

Billy is mean to Milne about how ‘that blasted bear’ has ruined his life.

Billy is scathing with Milne as he grows up, because Billy is bullied at boarding school due to the Christopher Robin connection. It isn’t until much later that Billy realizes what a great gift his father has given to the world in the form of happiness, in the form of a teddy bear and his friends, songs that make people happy and rhymes that stick in the head when you’re sad and lift you out of there.

I wish the biography had extended to us seeing Billy as a parent

I wish the movie had gone a little farther, and had allowed Billy to be a parent himself. For one, Billy would have realized that parents do not actually enjoy playing with their children at all, at least not at first. As a parent, our mind is always wandering, wondering if there was any point in the play and wandering off to the slights and insults, the joys and addictions, the bills and bookings in the adult world.

It would have been satisfying to see if Billy managed to be as nice to his kids as he expected his parents to be to him, and to see Billy’s kids’ report card on Billy’s parenting.

I’d have liked to see Billy, who makes Milne stoop over in regret at a railway station— who refuses the money from the Winnie The Pooh fortune — be a parent himself. I’d like to have seen just how much better he did. So much easier to judge, than be judged.

The character of A.A.Milne was played brilliantly by Domhnall Gleeson. After such a frightening account about Billy Moon, I’m deliberately not linking the child actor who played him!