Christopher Robin All Grown Up

Poor old Winnie-the-Pooh. Last year “Goodbye, Christopher Robin” turned the stuffed bear’s story into a downer about the perils of stardom. Then there was the competition: That other stuffed bear, Paddington, wowed critics and audiences alike.

Now comes Disney’s “Christopher Robin,” a middling live-action movie that tells a routine story about giving up the innocence of childhood for the realities of adulthood. Somehow, director Marc Forster and his four script cowriters have transformed A. A. Milne’s original sunny tale of an imagined group of stuffed toys, written to enchant his son, Christopher, into an oddly dark experience that may well frighten children and bewilder adults.

Ewan McGregor plays the grown-up Robin, who spent his early years in the Hundred Acre Wood with his make-believe pals Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger and the rest of the gang. Now he has a wife (Hayley Atwell) and young daughter (Bronte Carmichael), a job in London working for a luggage company as an efficiency expert. He’s overworking, neglecting his family and when he has to cancel a family getaway to his childhood house in the Hundred Acre Wood to work all weekend on a big project, he is in despair. 

What’s a man to do? Sit on a park bench, of course, and suddenly be visited by Pooh, who has run out of honey, cannot find his friends and needs help himself. Pooh, (voiced by Jim Cummings) is adorable, a bit tattered and showing his age, but still soft-spoken and kind. He is also something of a downer, like those men and women who still memorialize high school as the best years of their lives. But Pooh is a teddy bear and cannot be expected to understand human adulthood, with its pressures and complexities. 

The filmmakers do not see Pooh that way, of course. They make him the means for Robin to find his truth; and they make him and his gang real, not figments of Robin’s imagination, but walking, talking in-the-world stuffed creatures with whom others in the world interact. So dies Milne’s touching metaphor.

Now walking, talking, charming bears in London are not a problem: This year’s “Paddington 2” is as delightful, and good, a movie as 2018 has brought us. “Christopher Robin” never achieves any magic. Instead, when Robin and Pooh return to the Hundred Acre Wood to look for Pooh’s friends, they enter a dark, scary forest and Pooh wonders if it was always this way.

McGregor’s Robin is flat, as if the actor does not believe in the material. Pooh, with his peculiarly immobile face, utters his brand of circuitous wisdom in curious aphorisms and questions: “Is a briefcase more important than a balloon?” But it is Eeyore, the gloomy, pessimistic, miserable donkey who gets the best lines, and voiced by Brad Garrett in his sonorous imitation of a bass fiddle, he is a treat.

“Christopher Robin” is playing widely.