BEFORE: What I've got on tap is nearly a full week of Domhnall Gleeson and Michael Fassbender - it's 3 films with Gleeson, then 3 with Fassbender, then 2 more with Gleeson, though they're going to overlap and be in the same film just once. I think this started out as a Gleeson chain, but I was still too short for the month of January, so I saw a way to sandwich some Fassbender films into the middle of the chain - this will all make sense in retrospect, I promise. I tried to do all of one actor, then all of the other, but it just didn't work, that chain didn't end in a constructive way that I could connect to the next thing. But this 7-film chain now ends with a film that linked to just about anything, that I can definitely do something with.
But Domhnall Gleeson carries over from "Mother" where he played the analog of the biblical Cain from a famous book, and tonight he plays the writer of another book series. I did a lot of films last years about authors, from Hemingway to J.D. Salinger, and even children's author Beatrix Potter. I couldn't fit this one into last year's schedule, but as I stated before, that's what January is for, to get to the things that didn't fit into the previous year for one reason or another.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Miss Potter" (Movie #2,856)
THE PLOT: The relationship between writer A.A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin, and how this became the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh.
AFTER: I'm going to call this film out for one case of unnecesary time-jumping - there's just no need for it here, except to manufacture false dramatic tension. The film opens with Mr. Milne and his wife getting a dispatch from the British government, and we can deduce that their son is serving in World War II, and it's the kind of telegram that no parent wants to receive, if you know what I mean. He opens the telegram and we the audience can't see the message, but from their reactions, we can deduce that the news is not good. She goes off to cry, and he goes for a walk in the woods - and then we're thrown back to the father's service during World War I, aka "The war to end all wars, but we were being totally naive when we called it that." I know that this has become a common convention to start at the "most exciting" or "most dramatic" moment in a story, then go back and describe how this thing came to be. But there's no reason they couldn't have started this film with Milne senior in the trenches, in fact that could have even been more dramatic, if you think about it.
There are further flashbacks every time Milne gets a panic attack brought on by PTSD - which used to be called "shell shock" back in those days, I think. (George Carlin once had a great routine about how this condition once had a two-syllable name, then the next generation called it "battle fatigue", which was four syllables, and we now call it "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder", a name with eight syllables, so each war seemed to give it a longer and longer name.) But it seems to be a key part of Milne's character here, perhaps there was a whole generation of men who survived a war who then couldn't stand to be around popping champagne corks, car backfires and popping balloons. Even a swarm of bees seems to set off an attack, perhaps because they sounded like fighter planes or bombs falling from overhead.
So since the "War to end all wars" didn't seem to accomplish that, Milne set out to write something that would. But how do you write something to end all wars? It seems like he set himself an impossible goal. But while he was trying to write that, and while his wife was out partying in London, and the nanny was called away, he spent time with his young son, and their playtime and walks in the woods led to the creation of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The young Christopher Robin, more frequently called "Billy Moon" by his parents, devised some of the names like "Tigger" (probably a mis-pronunciation of "Tiger", though that isn't really parsed out here) and his mother bought him more stuffed animals she named Piglet, Kanga and Roo.
It seems that now for every successful Disney movie from the past, there now need to be at least two remakes or follow-up films. "Mary Poppins" had "Saving Mr. Banks" about the production of the original film, and now has the sequel "Mary Poppins Returns". Meanwhile after the success of the non-cel-animated "Jungle Book", "Beauty and the Beast" and "Cinderella" live-action/CGI remakes, they're now doing the same thing with "Dumbo", "Aladdin" and "The Lion King", so this means that after 7 or 8 decades of strip-mining and re-branding all of Western literature, from "Tarzan" to "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", the conglomerate has finally reached the end of the library shelf and is now forced to self-cannibalize their own works. When they finally make that biopic about the people who wrote and animated "The Little Mermaid", then DisneyCo. should theoretically become a black hole of creativity and collapse in on itself. (UPDATE: It turns out Disney had nothing to do with today's film, but they released the OTHER 2018 film about Christopher Robin Milne, which was just called "Christopher Robin". That's on PPV right now, I'll try to get to it later this year if it becomes available.)
But anyway, back to Christopher Robin - in last night's film we saw how a cult of personality formed around a man who wrote one poem (to be fair, that person was a stand-in for God and the poem was symbolism for the Bible) and this film oddly touches on the same topic. Here, though, it's not the author who became beloved, but the boy mentioned in the stories - when people in the U.K. and around the world found out this boy was real, and the author's son, they lost their minds and wrote him thousands of letters, and for a time he was the most famous boy in the world. And this is the same reason that today's celebrities are so protective of their children, not letting them be photographed or allowing their names in print. Because it's better to raise kids outside of the public eye, and also there are a lot of sickos out there. Even out in the 100-Acre wood, Christopher Robin didn't go there by himself.
It was a different time, though, and British men were not expected to be involved with raising children, or being present during childbirth, or even expected to show any emotion at all. Men were the breadwinners, and loving one's children was seen as something of an annoyance that could distract a man from doing his job properly, whatever it was. Besides, their fathers weren't involved in child-rearing, so why should they? That's what nannies were for, at least among the society couples that could afford them. Richer parents, such as those seen here, could pick and choose which parts of their children's lives they wanted to be a part of - and in the case of Mrs. Milne, that wasn't very much, it seems. Though she did provide the voices for the boy's stuffed animals (there's a weird tie-in with "The Beaver", from a few nights ago...).
But we do learn the genesis of the name "Winnie the Pooh", part of it came from a bear in the London Zoo that was shipped there from Winnipeg, and named "Winnie". I'm not sure that I buy the origin of the "Pooh" part, because I'm not even sure I understand it, but it has something to do with a swan. I read the four children's books by Milne when I was a kid, and a lot of it was over my head at the time, because I didn't understand much about British culture, like what a nanny was or why Buckingham Palace was important.
But what I think is important here is that Milne found his success through failure (failure to write that anti-war book) and then later found failure (the resentment that his son felt about being exploited) in success. Also, a man named Stephen Schlesinger bought all the merchandising, TV and movie rights to the character for the U.S. and Canada territories for $1,000 and 66% of future income, making Winnie-the-Pooh the first licensed character, simultaneously creating the licensing industry. And in 1961 that man's widow, along with A.A. Milne's widow, licensed the rights to Disney, because that's what you do, which led to the Disney animated films that started coming out in 1966. And eventually that led to books like "The Tao of Pooh" and "The Te of Piglet", and also, more recently, internet memes comparing the Pooh Bear to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
If the voice of the nanny here seems familiar, it's probably because she was the voice of Merida in "Brave", and if the big house Milne lives in near the end of the film looks familiar, it's probably because his house was later owned by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.
Also starring Margot Robbie (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Kelly Macdonald (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Will Tilson, Alex Lawther (last seen in "The Imitation Game"), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (last heard in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Vicki Pepperdine, Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "Moonwalkers") Richard McCabe (last seen in "Cinderella"), Geraldine Somerville (last seen in "My Week with Marilyn").
RATING: 5 out of 10 games of "Poohsticks"
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