Originally posted 2/2/05
Finding Neverland
Director: Marc Forster
Writer: David Magee, based on the play The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee
Producers: Richard N. Gladstein, Nellie Bellflower
Stars: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslett, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell, Dustin Hoffman, Freddie Highmore
You can almost see each layer of puzzlement and worry etch itself on the face of producer Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman) as his new play comes together. The last work by his writer, J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) was such a flop it closed almost immediately. Yet due to the length of the lease he took out on the theatre, he thought it worth the gamble to hold the house and the actors while Barrie took a stab at something else.
And yet the more he hears about this strange fantasia about fairy dust and pirates and Indians and crocodiles with ticking clocks in their bellies, apparently cooked up by Barrie while he played with some children in the park, the more convinced he is that he’s going to lose every cent. Still, as much as he might want to pull the plug on the whole mess, he finds to his endless consternation that he actually believes in Barrie, and thinks there’s the barest chance he could be on to something.
Maybe it has to do with that light in Barrie’s eyes in Finding Neverland, which dramatizes in slightly speculative fashion the writing and debut of Peter Pan as well as the peculiar Mr. Barrie, a misfit who could fake his way through grown-up life, but never quite understood it as well as he did the landscape of his own imagination.
He has a fine home and an attractive wife (Radha Mitchell) who probably hoped it was a phase when they were wed. Now, childless and seemingly sexless, they’ve settled into a routine whereby Mr. Barrie goes to the park each day to play with his dog and scribble in his journal, and Mrs. Barrie seeks ways to run in better circles and doesn’t ask about what’s in his journal.
She can’t help but be newly curious about its contents, though, after Mr. Barrie meets the widow Sylvia Llewellyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her four sons. Their father passed not too long ago, and each is dealing with it differently, though most bottled up is middle child Peter (Freddie Highmore), who fears and suspects most anything to do with feelings now, and thinks his mother is concealing something about her own condition.
Soon Mr. Barrie is spending every available hour leading them in all manner of make-believe adventure games, utilizing the romantic character stock all boys draw from – cowboys ‘n Indians, pirates, etc. It’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship – the boys find some measure of happiness again, Peter studies Barrie’s writing habits with an eye towards giving outlet to what’s inside himself, Sylvia gets company and financial aid independent of her overbearing mother (Julie Christie), and Barrie revisits an age we sense he was forced to leave too early. And he has strange visions of a very different sort of theatrical work in his head.
But while all within their circle is joy, the outside world sees it as incomprehensible and possibly even unseemly. Starved for scandal, the gossips decide that an affair between Barrie and Mrs. Davies is simply a given, then turn their imagined shock and horror upon the boys whose company he enjoys so much.
It’s touching the way the naïve Barrie is so dumbfounded to hear what people think about how all of this looks. But his play is coming together – Frohman patiently pays for dog suits and flying mechanisms while the actors rally around the script in search of some dignity. And Mrs. Davies’ health is declining, and young Peter is barely holding his fragile self together. Barrie can only go forward even as he realizes his own marriage is in jeopardy.
It’s that sensitively-paced but unyielding momentum which is Finding Neverland’s chief strength. While you may spend the first half simply admiring the handsome production values, Depp’s warmth and Scottish burr, the whimsical (yet tastefully restrained) staging of Barrie’s fantasies, and the simple soft touch director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) brings to bear, by the second half you realize, quite unexpectedly, that the movie has gotten under your skin.
It’s a delicate story; dangerously easy to overplay the sentiment of it, but the actors, David Magee’s script, even Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s rich old-fashioned musical score, all manage to run right up to that line, see it, and not cross it. Particularly extraordinary is young Freddie Highmore, who as Peter must wear outwardly the pains grown-ups keep corseted-in.
Wherever it is that the actor ends and role begins, you can sense a deep bond between Depp/Barrie and Highmore/Peter. Other movies would have focused on the affection between Barrie and Ms. Davies, who after all is being played by the beautiful movie star, to the exclusion of all else. But by staying true to its characters, in particular the quirky combination of needs for which Barrie found outlet in the Davies family, the movie earns our affection.
This is heart-tugging drama the likes of which Hollywood has mostly forgotten how to make. It ultimately won’t lift you to the ecstatic heights of a Shakespeare in Love, there’s too much which is solemn and lonely in the design of it for that. But the quiet charms it does have are more than worth a viewing, particularly when the payoff is getting to watch the world meet Peter Pan for the first time. And as the cherry on top, you learn how a few surprise opening night guests for which Mr. Barrie made arrangements, over the deep concerns of Mr. Frohman, may have secured this immortal fantasy’s place in history.