Goodbye Christopher Robin

I've had a soft spot for Winnie the Pooh ever since I red a brilliant article by Angela Carter that forensically summed up the differences between him and Paddington Bear. However until I'd seen the film (and then read up about AA Milne to prepare these notes) I had not been aware of his extensive career beyond Pooh.

Since this film came out I've also seen Tolkien and apart from their shared experience of the Battle of the Somme it's interesting to note how both writers, albeit in very different ways, used their writing to create a vision of a mythical wonderland.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

UK 2017          107 minutes

Director:          Simon Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald

“With its bittersweet interweaving of fact and fantasy, youthful innocence and adult trauma, this tale of the creation of a children’s classic could have been called Saving Mr Milne. Like Mary Poppins, Winnie-the-Pooh occupies a sacred space in our hearts and anyone wishing to co-opt some of that magic must tread very lightly indeed. Director Simon Curtis’s movie could easily have tripped (like Piglet) and burst its balloon as it evokes a dappled glade of happiness surrounded by the monstrous spectres of two world wars. Instead, it skips nimbly between light and dark, war and peace, like a young boy finding his way through an English wood, albeit one drenched with shafts of sugary, Spielbergian light.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Best Supporting Actress Nomination for Kelly Macdonald at the British Independent Film Awards
•  A further two wins

After his experiences at the Battle of the Somme A A Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) finds it difficult to resume his writing career. He moves his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) and their son Christopher Robin to a house in the country where he plans to write an anti-war book, but while taking his son for walks in the surrounding woods he begins to make up stories about the boy’s animal toys. The books are a great commercial success, but all this has a detrimental effect on Christopher Robin Milne who rejects his family and the earnings from his father’s writing and then enlists in the army during the Second World War.

Milne read Mathematics at Cambridge but while he was there also edited a student magazine, and after graduating made his living as a writer: he became a regular contributor to Punch (where he met the cartoonist E H Shepherd who was to provide the definitive illustrations for his children’s books) and his other literary output included at least 18 plays (including a stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows), three novels as well as several screenplays for the early British Film industry. However despite their success at the time all this work has been entirely overshadowed by the success of the two books of stories for children about Winnie-the-Pooh and two associated books of nursery rhymes When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six; in 2002 Forbes magazine ranked Winnie-the-Pooh as the most valuable fictional character and in 2005 Winnie-the-Pooh generated revenue of $6 billion from sales of merchandising products.

The production team for Goodbye Christopher Robin bring some very different backgrounds to the film. The screenplay is by Frank-Cottrell-Boyce who among his other work for cinema has written five screenplays for Michael Winterbottom including Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and 24 Hour Party People (2002); he also wrote the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, several award-winning novels for children and two recent episodes of Doctor Who. The soundtrack is by Carter Burwell who has worked extensively with both the Coen brothers and Martin McDonagh, and who among many awards and nominations has received Oscar nomination for the soundtracks he wrote for Carol (2015) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Director Simon Curtis began his career as a stage director at the Royal Court where he worked as an assistant to Danny Boyle before moving into television where he made his name with the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Return to Cranford (2009). He made his cinema debut with My Week with Marilyn (2011) and followed this with Woman in Gold (2015).

Here is a link to the trailer:

http://21stcenturyfilmbuff.blogspot.com

Woman in Gold

We screened this film at the beginning of October. After reading the reviews I was not expecting too much - inevitably I have to write notes on films I have not seen - but in the event I was impressed.

The background to the film is the major crime of the twentieth century, but the film managed to make it personal, as well as shining a light on to an aspect of the Holocaust that is perhaps generally forgotten, but which still has an impact today.

Here are my notes:

Woman in Gold

UK/USA 2015              109 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Bruhl, Katie Holmes and Tatiana Maslany

Maria Altmann was gracious and warm, the kind of woman referred to in another era as a grande dame. Her face was lined, but her bright brown eyes still held a gaze of wonder.

“It is a very complicated story. … People always asked me, did your aunt have a mad affair with Klimt? My sister thought so. My mother – she was very Victorian – said ‘How dare you say that?  It was an intellectual friendship.’ ”

Maria looked up at a reproduction of Adele’s portrait on the wall, regarding her face thoughtfully.

“My darling,” she said finally, “Adele was a modern woman, living in the world of yesterday.”

Anne-Marie O’Connor
The Lady in Gold

 

Sixty years after she fled from Nazi persecution in Vienna an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) begins legal action to retrieve possessions that the Nazis had sized from her family. These include the painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (subsequently known as the Woman in Gold) by Gustav Klimt which after the war had been hung in an Austrian art Gallery. 

Maria Altman’s struggle to recover the Woman in Gold had already been told in a 2008 documentary film called Adele’s Wish as well as in a book called The Lady in Gold, and although inevitably there have been a few minor changes to the events of her life to make it work in dramatic terms the feature film has brought her story to a far wider audience.

Despite the success of Maria Altmann in the long and complex legal struggle depicted in the film even today in Austria the government is still displaying an irresolute attitude towards returning property stolen from their Jewish owners: Stephan Templ wrote a book that catalogued hundreds of Jewish-owned buildings seized by the Nazis that have never been returned to their rightful owners, and was subsequently found guilty of defrauding the state after omitting the name of an estranged aunt from a family restitution claim. His appeal against the sentence has received the support of 75 Holocaust historians from around the world against and an Austrian journalist who is also a Holocaust survivor commented:

“The only reason Templ was prosecuted is that he touched a nerve with his book, which reminded Austrians how they stole Jewish property”.

For Austrians Klimt’s painting of the Woman in Gold was part of their national identity, although other examples of his work in Austria did not survive the war. In1895 he had been commissioned to produce three massive paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, but a public outcry from political, aesthetic and religious groups meant that they were never displayed in this location, and in 1945 retreating SS forces destroyed all three paintings.