Named by my parents after Christopher Robin, I’ve been a
lifelong Pooh-ologist. I memorized A. A. Milne’s “Vespers”—an
enchanting little poem about his son’s bedtime prayers—as a tot decades
ago. I can recite it still. That first poem, published in 1923, paved
the way for the quartet of books that launched the winsome boy and his
stuffed pal Winnie-the-Pooh, among the most cherished of characters in
children’s literature. Last year, I visited the original bear and his
chums—Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Roo—where they reside, behind glass, in
the children’s reading room at the New York Public Library. The
century-old toys had just returned from rehabilitation at the
stuffed-animal hospital, the librarian told me. For months now, I’ve
eagerly awaited the première of “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” the film
based on the real life of Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A.
Milne and the basis for the mythical child. I hoped it would restore the
simple sweetness of the narrative and the characters, from before they
were Disneyfied.

In its many layers, the movie does much more. Pooh is
largely a prop for a very adult exploration of the clash between reality
and innocence, war and peace, privacy and fame, and parent and child.
For all the sunny cinematography and British-esque scenes in the
re-created woods of Sussex, the movie is candid about life’s cruelties,
as well as the illusions that create much-needed escape.

It is antiwar at its core. A. A. Milne fought in the epic
Battle of the Somme, in 1916, when a million men were killed or injured.
It was one of the bloodiest battles in human history. Milne, already a
playwright and a novelist, was among those wounded. He went home
shell-shocked, with all the haunting symptoms of what is today diagnosed
as post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. He confused swarming bees
with bullets buzzing by him, popping balloons with incoming cannon fire.
He was morose and distant.

“What’d we fight that war for? Nothing’s changed,” Milne
shouts at his wife, Daphne, early in the film. “I’ve had enough of
making people laugh. I want to make them see!” Countries once got
together to ban slavery, he points out. “Why can’t we do it with war?”

His wife, played by Margot Robbie, is dismissive. “You know
what writing a book against war is like,” she says. “It’s like writing a book
against Wednesdays.” She begrudgingly and painfully bore him a son,
their only child. “I had a baby to cheer you up, and it didn’t,” she
tells him angrily. “Nothing is enough for you.”

Milne, portrayed ably by the Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, had a hard
time picking up his pen again. He moved the family to the countryside in
search of elusive inner peace. He didn’t find it until his
self-indulgent wife and Christopher Robin’s beloved nanny departed—one
for some fun, the other to attend to a dying mother—leaving Milne to
tend to a little boy he had never connected with. Their gradual bonding
on adventures in the countryside, the stuffed Pooh often dangling from
Christopher Robin’s hand, inspired Milne to write again. The connection
between them changed the course of both of their lives—with unintended
consequences that pleased neither.

Milne’s children’s books—two of tales and two of verse, which total a
mere seventy thousand words—are his best-known works, dwarfing his
denunciation of war, “Peace with Honour,” published in 1934, and
more than three dozen plays and screenplays in his long career.
Winnie-the-Pooh was not his intended legacy, particularly given his
limited sentiment about children generally.

Nor was the subsequent global celebrity sought by his son, the real
Christopher Robin, who wanted an anonymous boyhood to play in the woods,
free of the exploitative public appearances, whirlwind media interviews,
and fan mail that followed him throughout his life. The character
Christopher Robin was often unrecognizable to the real boy, who was
known at home as Billy Moon. That nickname was concocted from what the
family had originally planned to name him and his own first attempt to
pronounce Milne, which came out as Moon.

Christopher Robin Milne, or Billy Moon, played deliciously by the
dimpled Will Tilston,
was quite different from his namesake in the books, as he recounts in
his version of events, “The Enchanted Places,” published in 1974, almost two decades after his father’s death. Several stories and
poems—including “Vespers”—were based more on Milne’s memories of his own
childhood, rather than on his son’s actual life. A. A. Milne, not his
son, was also the one who defined the personalities of the animal
menagerie. Based on the film, the melancholic Eeyore may have been a
representation of Milne himself.

When he went off to boarding school, Christopher Robin Milne
was never able to escape his name, or the storybook character portrayed
by his father. He was taunted and teased and pushed down staircases.
Fame produced a different kind of trauma from which he spent much of the
rest of his life trying to recover.

When he angrily confronts his father in the film, Milne
replies, “You asked me to write a book for you.”

“Yes,” his son says, “for me—not about me.”

Milne stopped writing Pooh storybooks after completing four, vowing
never to write another word about the boy and his bear. “The day will
come when everyone will forget Winnie-the-Pooh,” he tells the boy in the
film.

It was too late. The popular fiction about their lives irretrievably
swallowed them up. Christopher Robin Milne told Gyles Brandreth years later that his father “had got where he was by
climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good
name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”

In the film, the boy’s nanny tries to placate her ward.
“After the war, there was so much sadness that hardly anyone could
remember what happiness was like,” she tells him. “Then along came
Winnie-the-Pooh, and it was like a tap. He just turned it on, and
happiness came out.”

In one of the twists based on real life, Christopher Robin
Milne finally escapes his identity by joining the British Army to fight
in the Second World War. “I want to sign up,” he plaintively tells his
father near the end of the film. “I want to be anonymous.”

He, too, has trouble finding himself upon his return. Now known simply
as Christopher, he and his wife end up opening a small bookstore in
Devon and doting on their own single child, a daughter named Clare, who
has cerebral palsy. In his own memoirs, the younger Milne later came to
grips with his childhood. But he refused to partake in the vast profits
from his father’s books, or the sales of the franchise to
Disney.

“Goodbye Christopher Robin” resonates today amid multiple wars and a
celebrity culture that skews fame, life, and values. It confronts family
schisms. And it reflects on the long and sometimes tortured path to
healing the human psyche. In some ways, the film sets out to do too
much, to address too many themes, in a mere hundred minutes. It tries to
cater to audiences ranging from children to veterans. Yet each
generation will find its own story line in the movie. I loved it. But,
then, I have a bias.