Monday, December 21, 2020

Other Doctor Lives: Christopher Robin (2018, PG)

Another voiceacting role for Peter Capaldi. Despite a talented cast, this nostalgia trip doesn’t quite land for me.

After leaving his adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood to go to boarding school, Christopher Robin grew up, got married, had a daughter, and became an efficiency manager for a luggage company (it’s like the writers specifically brainstormed the most humdrum career imaginable.) As an adult, he pours all his time and effort into work, anxious to provide for his family who care more about the time he spends with them than the money he can bring in. When he bails on a family holiday to deal with a work crisis, his plans are derailed by the unexpected arrival of his old friend: Winnie the Pooh.

This has to be said first: although the film was made before the allegations against voice actor Jim Cummings came out, I’m only seeing it now. I wouldn’t say I was actively thinking about the allegations the whole time I was watching the movie, but it always remained in the back of my mind and colored the majority of scenes with Pooh and Tigger. For a movie that’s designed to evoke warm feelings of childhood, it’s not going to be able to accomplish that when it’s retroactively tainted by something like this. I’ll say right off the bat that I won’t be recommending this film.

Onto the movie itself (which, again, was made and released before the allegations came out, so the production isn’t to be faulted for Cummings’s involvement in it.) Stories like this have been Disney’s bread and butter in recent years. The live-action remakes of their animated classics are obviously made for adults jonesing for the comfort food of nostalgic childhood memories, and Christopher Robin follows the even more targeted beat of Mary Poppins Returns, wherein the nostalgia isn’t just implicit. Rather, it’s the whole point of the story, a sad/cynical grown-up Christopher Robin rediscovering the wonder and joy he had as a child. In my view, the movie doesn’t fully land on that front. It feels to me like a film that tries to make itself too simultaneously for both adults and children, with the two seeming to cancel each other out. The zany humor of Pooh’s clumsy antics are squarely aimed at kiddies, but I doubt young viewers will have the patience for scenes of Christopher Robin trying to balance his work budgets.

Furthermore, the script is just overbaked. Christopher Robin’s wife and daughter have so many lines of dialogue about how he doesn’t care about anything but work that the story could’ve easily pivoted to him being visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. (Coincidentally, it annoys that, even though Christopher Robin is largely portrayed as a stick-in-the-mud who’s always working, this particular instance involves him working overtime to try and keep the company from going under – and more specifically, to keep everyone from losing their jobs. It’s like, what was he supposed to do, tell everyone, “Sorry you’re all about to be unemployed, but I promised my family we’d go away to the cottage for the weekend, so….” I get the point, obviously – it’s not subtle – but they go about it in a really clunky way.)

None of this is down to the cast, who all do their best with the material they’re given. As Christopher Robin, Ewan McGregor, God bless him, commits 100%, and he manages to inject even the ridiculous scenes with a little sincerity. Hayley Atwell is in the mostly-thankless role of Christopher Robin’s wife Evelyn, but she does what she can with it, and Mark Gatiss (Mycroft!) is reliable as the villain of the piece, Christopher Robin’s selfish, demanding boss. When it comes to the voice cast playing Christopher Robin’s friends, Brad Garrett was clearly born to play Eeyore and Toby Jones and Sophie Okonedo are effective but underused as Owl and Kanga, respectively.

As Rabbit, Capaldi joins the “effective but underused” members of the voice cast. Only about half of the Hundred Acre Wood characters are a meaningful part of the story, and Rabbit isn’t one of them. In his few brief scenes, Capaldi hits the right notes for Rabbit – a little bossy, a little fussy, and a little self-important – but there’s just not much of him here.

Accent Watch

London, pretty decent.

Recommend?

In General – No. The Jim Cummings allegations tarnish any mild enjoyment/amusement it might have engendered, but even without that, I wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about it.

Peter Capaldi – Not necessarily. He’s hardly in it, and the scenes he’s in aren’t really memorable enough to be worth it.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, scary moments for kids, plenty of “don’t try this at home,” and involvement by an alleged domestic/sexual abuser.

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