While Captain Hook may never have been able to kill Peter Pan, the last half-century of reincarnations have come pretty darn close. Which is why, as the storm of biopics descends upon Oscar season, it's refreshing to see a movie piloted with enough skill that it kept away, at least in part, from the dangerous pitfalls of artistic license and historic viability.
The last decade hasn't treated Pan very well. Spielberg's Hook (1991), resorted to a "What if?" plot spiraling Pan and the rest of the characters into a world of cell phones and corporate business, an interesting twist, but a little heavy handed at times. The next Pan feature, P.J. Hogans' Peter Pan (2003) depended on cinematic gimmicks to cover-up its lack luster acting. Glen Casale's and Gary Halvorson's raw translation of the Herbert Brenon classic fell short of the original, well, because it wasn't the original.
In Finding Neverland, Director Marc Foster (Monster's Ball) has adopted Alan Knee's play, The Man Who Was Peter Pan, the story of the eccentric Victorian J.M. Barrie, author of Dear Brutus, The Little White Bird, and most notably, Peter Pan. The story begins in the wake of the failure of Barrie's (Johhny Depp) play, and in the midst of a disastrous marriage with a dispassionate and disinterested wife (Radha Mitchell). He is an eccentric and a misfit; unwilling to join his wife in their theater box, he watches the opening of his flop play, The Admiral Crichton, at a side exit, peering out from behind cherry red curtains. It's a fitting image for the man, and his play. Overtly fantastic on the surface, but subtly complex and troubling underneath.
While his married life is perhaps only a side plot and deeply underdeveloped, Depp still does well to provide a portrait of the artist as unsympathetic, or at the very least, unaware of his marriage. Of course, he gets a little help from Mitchell, though a nonchalant wife isn't exactly a humdinger of a role. But then again, playing eccentric characters has become a norm for Depp. Barrie's transformation begins when he meets the Davies boys and their young windowed mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) in a park in London. His relationship with the boys and their mother, based on nonsensical games and imaginative illusions help the struggling artist and the audience escape the tedium of his oppressive marriage. It is this newfound family that aids Barrie in delivering on stage the brainchild of his imagination, Peter Pan.
In many ways Finding Neverland is a formulaic tearjerker. It employed all the classic elements -- an understated love story, a troop of young boys with British accents, Julie Cristie playing Davies' protective and domineering mother and even Dustin Hoffman as Barrie's American financier, producer and insightful father figure. As a rule, not a tear was shed unless a morally uplifting scene followed it. And everyone got to see to Neverland.
Was Barries' real life that brilliant? No, but then again, that's why the movie isn't a biopic. The script doesn't cover enough of Barrie's life either faithfully, or in depth enough to make it a biography. It's also not just a regurgitation of the classic Peter Pan narrative--the movie reeks of Hollywood. Its dialogue is fairly scripted, the music is lush and supportive, and the cinematography at times is gorgeous. The movie doesn't try to be too informative or too provocative. For a movie about never growing old, the Finding Neverland's reinvention of a classic story is refreshing and enjoyable.
