2 out of 4 stars Title Goodbye Christopher Robin Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan Directed by Simon Curtis Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Kelly Macdonald and Will Tilston Genre Biopic Classification PG Country U.K. Language English Year 2017

Many an author uses personal material to the distress of family members, but there are few more bitter examples than that of A.A. Milne and his Christopher Robin – at least according to a new biopic about the English author's relationship with his son. Goodbye Christopher Robin portrays the young Christopher Milne, known to his family as Billy Moon, as a child often neglected by a distant father and a vapid mother until his toys inspired the Winnie the Pooh books, at which point his parents thoughtlessly permitted the commercial exploitation of his sudden fame.

Perhaps the true story was slightly less Dickensian – although in reality, the adult Christopher Milne was estranged from his parents – but in Simon Curtis's film version these lives produce an occasionally sentimental melodrama with a very sour aftertaste.

In fashioning their script, writers Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan barely ever quote A.A. Milne, leaving viewers to recall a poem about a little boy saying his prayers or to tease out the lines of Disobedience ("James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree/Took great/Care of his Mother/Though he was only three … ") from the figure of a discontented mother who has gone AWOL. Meanwhile, the characters of Pooh, Piglet, Kanga and Roo gradually emerge from the nursery menagerie. But that, unfortunately, is about it for subtlety and charm in a script that offers stark exposition of hard feelings and direction that insists on the darkest possible characterization of the unhappy Milnes.

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In the 1920s, Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) is a highly successful West End playwright but he also suffers ugly flashbacks to his days on the Western Front. He decamps from London to the Sussex countryside, much to the chagrin of his lively wife, Daphne (Margot Robbie), a flapper who has only borne her sad-sack husband a child because she thinks it might cheer him up. This seems a fool's errand – after all, the man's nickname is "Blue" – but Daphne is a nasty combination of foolishness and sharp edges. Once the baby arrives, disappointing his parents because they wanted a girl, the only person who seems to bond with him is his loving nanny, Nou (Kelly Macdonald), who raises Billy as his mother parties and his father writes.

Or rather fails to write until the fateful two weeks during which Nou is attending to a dying mother, Daphne is off in London wallpaper shopping and Milne and his son finally spend some quality time together. In an extreme example of dramatic condensing, all four of Milne's children's books – two of verse, two about Pooh – seem to usher forth from this one fertile and touching encounter. The books are rapturously received and soon the entire world wants to meet "the real Christopher Robin" while only Nou possesses enough nascent child psychology to notice this is not particularly healthy for Billy Moon.

As the shell-shocked and regretful Milne, Gleeson does make a striking and sympathetic figure of repression and anguish, even as his sorrowful character botches fatherhood, but generally the film suffers from anachronistic hindsight about standards of parenting. Today, the Milnes' outsourcing of child-rearing to nurses and boarding schools seems calculated to estrange their son from their affections, but they were only doing what any British couple of their class and era did.

In that regard, Robbie's brittle and hyper Daphne, with only rare hints of maternal feeling, is a misguidedly judgmental performance, although that should be blamed on the director not the actress. Meanwhile, Billy's exposure to the public and the press, the dangers of which are so swiftly perceived by Macdonald's pleasantly saint-like Nou, was typical of the period's voracious appetite for escapism. (Billy's situation is somewhat reminiscent of the Dionne Quints' plight.)

In the end, in a handful of later scenes where an effectively recalcitrant Alex Lawther takes over the role of Billy/Christopher from the competent young Will Tilston, we are exposed to the damage done, leaving the director and writers desperately searching for some way to pull a happier ending out of this mess.

There would be better ways to tell this story – a good deal more understatement might make Billy's plight hover as potential tragedy rather than crash land as ugly drama. But at the core of Goodbye Christopher Robin is a conundrum that no filmmaker or screenwriter can solve without resorting to dishonesty: We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.