Christopher Robin Is as Deeply Weird as It Is Charming

Disney’s new take on the Winnie the Pooh property is a gentle, melancholic reminder that we should all relax once in a while.

David Sims

Aug 3, 2018 

This summer-blockbuster season has presented audiences with several horrifying, apocalyptic scenarios: Thanos gathering his infinity stones, terrorists threatening nuclear war, dinosaurs running rampant around the planet. But nothing this year sent me into a spiral of existential dread as much as the revelation that adult Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), the protagonist of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, isn’t taking enough vacation. The setting is postwar Britain, and the premise of Disney’s film (directed by Marc Forster) is similar to Hook in that the main character of a beloved children’s series has grown up and forgotten the whimsical wonder of his youth.

Beyond that: Christopher Robin has neglected the transformative power of taking time off from work. This is a crisis that simply cannot stand, and Christopher Robin sets about fixing it by reintroducing the cherished animals he used to spend his summers playing with in the semi-mythic Hundred Acre Wood. Rather than the colorful cartoons of earlier Disney Winnie the Pooh entries, these creatures are now three-dimensional beings, most of them resembling living dolls, with Pooh possessed of a particularly blank, baleful stare. “Nothing comes from nothing,” the grown-up Christopher is fond of saying in a chiding tone, but he’s clearly wrong—one can interpret quite a lot from Pooh’s expressionless gaze.

It is hard to know who exactly Christopher Robin was made for. The screenplay is credited to three people: the wonderfully acerbic indie writer/director Alex Ross Perry, the Oscar-winning Tom McCarthy (director/co-writer of Spotlight), and the Hidden Figures writer Allison Schroeder. Together, they’ve made a film that is perhaps too elegiac and gloomy for children, but also too straightforwardly fanciful for their parents. It’s an odd, melancholic experience that at times recalls Terrence Malick as it does A. A. Milne, but there will certainly be some viewers in its exact wheelhouse, and I was one of them.

The setting is a great help in terms of selling Christopher Robin’s somber tone and formulaic setup. After a prologue centered on a young Christopher (Orton O’Brien) having one last big adventure with his animal friends, a montage depicts his tough passage into adulthood. He’s packed off to boarding school, his father dies (offscreen) before Christopher has entered his teenage years, and then he fights in World War II like so many of his countrymen, while his wife, Evelyn (Hayley Atwell), raises their daughter, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), on the home front.

The film is set a few years after that. Madeline is a bright if serious-minded young girl, and Christopher works endless days and nights at a luggage company in London trying to find cost efficiencies for his posh twit of a boss Giles Winslow (Mark Gatiss). As such, his family has fallen by the wayside, and they have to weekend at his childhood countryside getaway without him. Oh, bother! The only solution is for Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings) to wake from his long slumber and stumble into the real world, first demanding that Christopher help him find his other friends (Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and the rest of the animal gang), and then working to shake him out of his bourgeois reverie.

The film will likely draw comparison to the ongoing Paddington series, another bear-focused bit of charming British storytelling. But that is a contemporary retelling of a children’s classic with a broad metaphor about how the power of community spirit is magnified by the acceptance of outsiders. Winnie the Pooh, who by his own admittance is a bear of “very little brain” and is mostly focused on having fun and being with his friends, exists to remind everyone to take a break once in a while. “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day,” he muses to Christopher. He, like Paddington, should be regarded as a hero.

The best chunk of the film is the first act, in which Pooh wanders around postwar London, baffled at all the work everyone has to do (“Why is he in a cage?” he asks about a ticket-taker at the train station). Christopher has become quite the stolid grump, but Pooh has no time for grumpiness; he barely seems to understand what it is, instead responding to each of Christopher’s exasperated sighs with his trademark solipsistic maxims. “That’s a silly explanation,” Christopher grumbles as Pooh explains how he managed to appear in the real world. “Why thank you,” Pooh replies.

Quickly enough, the barricades Christopher has built in his mind against any kind of capricious thinking begin to tumble, and his other friends appear—there’s the morose Eeyore (Brad Garrett), the energetic Tigger (Cummings again), the timid Piglet (Nick Mohammed), the comforting Kanga (Sophie Okonedo), and the nervy Rabbit (Peter Capaldi). Somewhat bizarrely, the characters who were based on stuffed animals (owned by the real Christopher Robin, the son of A. A. Milne) are animated as living toys, while those that weren’t, like Rabbit and Owl (Toby Jones), look like real creatures.

The material in the Hundred Acre Wood is at times eerie (its landscape is dead and overgrown until Christopher returns), though that part of the story stays true to the notion that the frightening Heffalumps and Woozles are simply conjured from Piglet’s and Pooh’s feverish imagination. The stuff in the real world is a little more chaotic, and there’s one car-chase sequence that felt like action for action’s sake (above all else, Pooh should be a gentle franchise). But I’ll forgive those flourishes in light of this movie’s essential calmness; in Christopher Robin, the elemental joy of carrying a red balloon is given equal weight as the particulars of Christopher’s job.

I’m not quite sure which madman at Disney gave the green light to a movie that uses the Winnie the Pooh series as a way into the emotional drudgery of Britain’s returning soldiers. Christopher Robin is the kind of uncanny experiment that only gets to happen in children’s films once every few years. But any time that underlying weirdness threatens to overwhelm everything, Pooh is there to urge the viewer not to stress—a message that, especially in 2018, couldn’t be more helpful.

FALL 2018 ROVING EYE FILM FESTIVAL: November 6, 7 & 11th

FLICKERS PARTNERS WITH ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY TO PRESENT THE RABBI MARC JAGOLINZER JEWISH EXPERIENCE FILM SERIES

FREE PROGRAM sponsored by the Helene and Bertram Bernhardt Foundation

BRISTOL, RI (October 24, 2018) – The Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival has partnered with Roger Williams University (RWU), to present its Fall-edition of the annual Roving Eye International Film Festival. The popular and acclaimed festival celebrating global cinema and artists, announces its 2018 sidebar program on the Jewish Experience through short films, documentary, media and guest speakers. The event takes place November 6, 7, & 11th. This year’s series explores representations of the Jewish experience in Israel, across the globe and the Holocaust through 10 recent films and is dedicated to the late Rabbi Marc Jagolinzer and entitled: “ARTS AND CULTURE: SHAPING THE FUTURE, REFLECTING THE PAST.” The series includes a talk by the Rev. Nancy Hamlin Soukup, University Multifaith Chaplain, RWU. All programming will take place on the Bristol, RI, campus of Roger Williams University at the Mary Tefft White Cultural Center and Global Heritage Hall, Room 01.

The series is free and open to the public!

http://www.film-festival.org/RovingEye_JewishExperienceFALL2018.php

"Through film and scholarship, this series tells the stories of the Jewish experience globally—stories of joy, sorrow, faith, a rich culture, diasporas, fear and ultimately, hope,” said the Rev. Nancy Hamlin Soukup, RWU University Multifaith Chaplain co-organizer of the event with Flickers.

The Fall Jewish Experience sidebar of the Roving Eye Festival is presented in partnership with the Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, the Helene and Bertram Bernhardt Foundation, RWU School of Humanities, Arts and Education, Dean Cynthia Scheinberg, RWU Department of Communication, Graphic Design and Web Development, Dr. Roxanne O’Connell, Department Chair, RWU Hillel, and the Spiritual Life Office.

THIS YEAR’S SCHEDULE:

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

6:00 p.m.

HOW WE SEE OURSELVES…

Documentary and Narrative Film Screenings with Director's Discussion

Location: Mary Tefft White Cultural Center, RWU Library

The Museum of Lost Things
Directed by: Gregory Cioffi | 22 min. USA, 2017

Synopsis
The Museum of Lost Things concerns a writer in his late 40s who, while sitting in an all-night diner, tells to an affable waitress the story of his stumbling upon a strange museum on an obscure street in downtown Manhattan. His story takes us through the labyrinths of the museum, where, with the help of a nonchalant museum guard, he encounters exhibition rooms seemingly dedicated to him alone, each one representing a piece of the man’s lost past. Some rooms are filled with objects, such as his lost umbrellas or his lost books, and still others contain aspects of his life that he hardly remembers. In this absurdist mystery, the museum visitor discovers rooms of lost hope, of lost patience, of lost illusions, and is always surprised by what he finds. But will he find what he’s looking for? Will he recapture his past? Or is the museum only a fantasy, one of the writer’s own inventions?

A Soldier's Dream: The Milt Feldman Story
Directed by: Eduardo Montes-Bradley | 50 min. Belgium, Germany, USA, 2018

Synopsis
Born in 1924 to hard working immigrants from Russia, His parents had a candy story in Brooklyn and he vividly remembers the social transformations that followed the Great Depression, a time in which the quite Jewish neighborhood where he grew up, bared witness to the Nazi youth parading swastikas alongside the Stars and Stripes. By 1937, the echoes of Fascism in Europe were an open invitation for thousands to gather at Madison Square Garden where thousands of Hitler sympathizers cheered the speech of rightwing Nationalists.

The fall of 1944 will find Milt amongst the troops of the 106th Infantry Division, on board the HMS Queen Elizabeth on his way to Europe. He was ready to do his part of the American deal, just as his father Jack and done before him in some of the major battles of World War I. Milt’s was going to be an easy ride, after all most of France and Belgium had already been liberated and it was a matter of time before the Third Reich would collapse.

However, on the morning of December 16th Hitler launched a massive offense in the Western Front in what came to be known as The Battle of the Bulge. Private Milton Feldman was capture a few days, then marched and shipped by train on a boxcar to Stalag IV-B, a POW camp deep into German territory.

Now, the elderly gentleman, the veteran of The Bulge, approaching 94, becomes the subject of “Milt Feldman: A Soldier’s Dream”, a documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

6:00 p.m.

MEMORIES NEVER DIE

Documentary and Narrative Film Screenings with Director's Discussion

Location: Global Heritage Hall, 01

Stamm
Directed by: Jacob Grodnik | 10 min. USA, 2017

Synopsis
In the hours preparing for America's first offensive in WWI, a young American soldier leaves his forward post momentarily. Upon returning, he finds his fellow marine missing and is met with German gunfire. He narrowly escapes, only to trip into a foxhole with a German solider. They struggle for their lives. The American sees that the German wears a Star of David around his neck. His last chance at survival is to prove to the German that he himself is also Jewish, in the hopes that one loyalty will outweigh the other. The two young men, in broken English and half-comprehended German connect; describing their homelands, trying to communicate what it's like to be a Jew in America and Germany.

'Stamm' is German for tribe. The film aims to illustrate that we are all of the same tribe, regardless of the arbitrary boundaries of country; there is only one tribe, 'the human tribe.' Over 100,00 Jews fought for Germany in World War I, and this is the story of one, whose loyalties are challenged and tested.

A THOUSAND KISSES
Directed by: Richard Goldgewicht | 17 min.  USA. Germany, 2018 (animation)

Synopsis
Inspired by the actual correspondence recovered by the couple’s grandsons 80 years later in São Paulo, A Thousand Kisses presents a peculiar love story tainted by the harsh historical context of its time, with a light appeal of irony and real-life poetry.

ALONE IN KLEZMER
Directed by: Kenneth O’Brien-LLontop | 11 min. USA, 2018

Synopsis
A book with a marked sheet is what Gretel finds in an old bookstore in Miami. The intimate memory of a past of misery in another country is mixed with the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature Isaac Bashevis Singer in a film that is an essay on exile, literature, and those daily gestures that are shown as beautiful revelations.

Footsteps of My Father
Directed by: Paul Allman | 38 min. Belgium, Germany, USA, 2018

Synopsis
This act of bravery would have been forgotten and lost to history, had it not been for the rediscovery of Edmonds’ private journals, by his son, and a chance encounter with one of the surviving POWs.

Chris Edmonds set out to locate the survivors, and discover the truth about his dad during his time as a P.O.W.

Roddie's story is a testament to how a simple commitment to fairness and equality can make a huge difference in the world.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

2:00 p.m.

THE STORIES WE TELL. the Stories we share

Documentary and Narrative Film Screenings with Director's Discussion

Location: Global Heritage Hall, 01

The Visitor
Directed by: Justin Olstein | 10 min. Australia, 2018

Synopsis
In present-day Melbourne, just after midnight, Naomi is awakened by a frantic young woman on the run. Naomi grapples with a situation that defies reality and, as the night unfolds, she must decide how far she can go to protect her visitor from rapidly encroaching danger.

Valentino And The Prodigy
Directed by: Matt Anderson | 20 min. USA, 2018

Synopsis
A washed-up pianist is hired to train a young piano prodigy who is suffering from stage fright after the death of his father

Aharon's Childhood
Directed by: Arnaud Sauli | 66 min. Israel, France, 2018

Synopsis
Aharon’s Childhood (76’) main character is the late great Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. The film explores in depth Appelfeld’s writing process in his study and his relationship to a childhood under the shadow of tragedy. Appelfeld talks freely on love, women, Jewishness, Israël and his experience of being an eternal refugee with his French translator Valerie Zenatti. She came to his home to receive his last manuscript, and beyond that his artistic testament. The film has a poetic approach to his literary work travelling in time and space, from carpathian ills to Jerusalem, from 1941 to the present in a Jerusalem café.

Aharon Appelfeld is a survivor, he was until 2018 one of the last writer who survived the Holocaust. His writing elicits breath from a life doomed to death. Born in Ukraine in 1932, he escaped as a child and survived in a forest. Since, cultivating a deep sense of being alive, he is trying to retrieve the voices and faces of the ones who didn’t survive.

Aharon’s Childhood is a love story. Love is embodied in language, in writing, in a relationship eyeing a past and present world. She seizes his words, transmits them in French as an accomplishment of « being simultaneously writer and reader. » He looks at her, wandering what heritage would remain of him in this world.

Reception Follows at 3:45 p.m.

4:15 p.m.

Eva
Directed by: Ted Green & Mika Brown | 118 min. Germany, Israel, Poland, Romania, USA, United Kingdom, 2018

Synopsis
As a 10-year-old 'Mengele Twin,' Eva Kor suffered the worst of the Holocaust: being experimented on by the Auschwitz 'Angel of Death.' At 50, she launched the biggest international manhunt in history. Now 84, she urgently circles the globe in failing health to promote the controversial lesson her journey has taught: healing through forgiveness. “Eva” tells the full, unvarnished story of this historic figure for the first time. Narrated by Hollywood icon Ed Asner, it features spectacular new footage from Auschwitz, from the Transylvanian hamlet from which Eva’s family was carted off to slaughter, and on a boat off Israel where she first tasted freedom. Interviews include Holocaust experts, celebrities she's moved (Elliott Gould, Wolf Blitzer, Ray Allen), fellow survivors she's enraged, and myriad young people whose lives she’s changed -- in many cases saved. Eva Kor has emerged as a worldwide spokeswoman for peace — a recent Buzzfeed video has 187 million views — and 'Eva' will be her legacy.

The film’s co-director, Ted Green, will be available for a Q&A following the screening.

Following the screening:

Join us for a conversation with the family of the late Rabbi Marc Jagolinzer after whom our November programming is dedicated. Hosted by the Rev. Nancy J. Soukup, RWU Multifaith Minister.

For more information, contact the Spiritual Life Program at Roger Williams University, email nsoukup@rwu.edu. Directions to Roger Williams University can be found at www.rwu.edu

Location: Global Heritage Hall, Room 01

Roger Williams University, One Old Ferry Road, Bristol, RI

Time: 2:00 and 4:15 p.m.

Cost: Free Admission

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