Christopher Robin review: A kids' romp this isn't

This very English affair is a redemptive tale about a man who has lost any sense of play or joy

Dir Marc Forster, 103 mins, starring: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Mark Gatiss, Jim Cummings (voice), Peter Capaldi (voice) Sophie Okonedo (voice) Toby Jones (voice)

It’s hard to say what a children’s audience will make of Christopher Robin. This is as much a film about a man going through a mid-life crisis as it is about Pooh and Eeyore gambolling in the Hundred Acre Wood. It has the same sense of yearning for a lost childhood that ran through last year’s Goodbye Christopher Robin. A kids’ romp it isn’t.

Director Marc Forster shoots in autumnal colours, which adds yet further to the nostalgic and sometimes downbeat feel of the film. It’s a very English affair, based on the characters from AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, and yet several of the talking animals have American accents. Charming, wistful and funny in parts, the film eventually becomes as sickly sweet the honey that the bear consumes in such prodigious quantities.

Forster has made a strange mixture of films. His credits include a James Bond film (Quantum Of Solace), a Death Row drama (Monster’s Ball) and, most similar to this, Finding Neverland (about how JM Barrie came to write Peter Pan).

They may be in very different genres but his movies tend to be probing and thoughtful. Christopher Robin is a redemptive tale about a man who has lost any sense of play or joy. Re-engaging with Piglet, Pooh and the other critters from his childhood enables Christopher to see life in a newer, brighter perspective.

Ewan McGregor’s role as Christopher is strangely similar to the one he played in Philip Roth’s adaptation, American Pastoral. He’s an overworked businessman who risks becoming estranged from the daughter he dotes on. Whether his battle to overcome his disillusionment with adult life is enough to sustain a Disney family movie is a very moot point.

One of the film’s most graceful sequences is the opening, which takes us through Christopher’s life. We see him as a boy having a farewell tea party in the woods with Pooh, Eeyore, Owl et al. before heading off to boarding school.

They fret over what might happen if he forgets all about them. This is precisely what happens. He grows up very quickly. In a few moments, we are whisked through his courtship of the beautiful Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) after meeting her on the top floor of a double-decker bus, and his traumatic experiences in the Second World War.

At the end of it all, Christopher is like Mr Banks in Mary Poppins, an overworked, joyless British businessman, more interested in the contents of his briefcase than in his wife and child. His employer is family firm Winslow Luggage, which is faltering because everybody else is working too hard as well.

They don’t have time to go on holiday and therefore aren’t buying suitcases. Christopher is given the weekend to come up with a way of saving 20 per cent in costs. If he fails, his beloved old colleagues all stand to lose their jobs. So does he. He therefore abandons his loved ones, staying in London to work while they head off to the countryside.

Just when Christopher is at his lowest ebb, desperately hiding from his unctuous, creepy next door neighbour who continually pesters him to play gin rummy, Pooh miraculously re-materialises in his life. The little bear pops up on the other side of a park bench.

Some of the dialogue is witty and surprisingly poignant. Whether the ideas come via Milne or from screenwriters Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder, the script has a resonance you don’t expect in a summer family movie.

Pooh himself turns out to be a philosopher king with an unlikely flair for epigrams. “People say nothing is impossible but I do nothing every day,” is a typical example of the bear’s wisdom and fondness for paradox. “There is more to life than balloons and honey,” Christopher protests to him at one stage. “Are you sure?” Pooh very earnestly replies.

Like Christopher himself, the animals in the woods are on the world-weary side. We expect a certain melancholy and fatalism from Eeyore but the others also sound subdued. Their behaviour is very different from the typical zany, hyper-charged characters in Disney or Pixar animated features. It’s as if they’ve all been beaten down by vindictive woozles who’ve stolen all their joie de vivre.

The film deals in very sketchy fashion with the relationship between Christopher and his long-suffering wife. His daughter likewise features only in passing. He seems far closer to Pooh than he does to her. He is trying to recapture his own lost childhood, not to bring the magic he once experienced into her world.

Adults may appreciate a film prepared to delve into such dark corners but their children will be bewildered by some of the turns into the woods that Christopher Robin takes.

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Christopher Robin hits UK cinemas 17 August.