SALON

Friday, Nov 12, 2004 9:00 PM UTC

“Finding Neverland”

Johnny Depp soars high as "Peter Pan" playwright J.M. Barrie, but this movie doesn't ever quite take off.

By

Topics: Johnny Depp, Movies,

Because no one knows where genius, or even just plain old inspiration, comes from, it’s a favorite game of writers, filmmakers and playwrights to try to guess. In “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster — working from a script by David McGee, adapted from a play by Allan Knee — attempts to trace, in a manner more suggestive than factual, the roots of Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” From what thin air did Barrie, who’d already written a number of successful plays, pull his ideas? And how does an ordinary mortal take a menacing pirate with a hook for a hand, a crocodile with a ticking tummy, and a flying boy who refuses to grow up and make any sense of it at all?

No one has the answers to those questions, and the director and writers of “Finding Neverland” don’t pretend to, even though the picture is, as we’re tepidly alerted at the beginning, “based on true events.” What Forster is interested in here is less a biopic than a mapped lunar landscape of one writer’s imagination. Forster has some good ideas here: A few of the fantasy sequences in “Finding Neverland” are lovely, and he stages a few brief scenes from “Peter Pan” in a way that gives us a sense of the impact the play must have had on straitlaced, bejeweled Edwardian audiences. But if “Finding Neverland” shows a bit more grace and surefootedness than Forster’s last picture, “Monster’s Ball,” it just doesn’t have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.

It does, however, have Johnny Depp, as James Matthew Barrie. The movie opens in London in 1903, just as Barrie is coming off a less-than-successful play. His producer (played with amusingly distracted efficiency by Dustin Hoffman) isn’t particularly troubled by the play’s failure, but he is, of course, hoping the next one will be a hit. The problem is that Barrie doesn’t yet have an idea for the next one. It’s also clear that he and his coolly beautiful wife, Mary (Radha Mitchell), have a relationship that’s affectionately businesslike and not much more.

One day while Barrie is having his outing in the park — he goes there with his bear of a dog, Porthos, and spends the morning jotting down ideas for his plays while taking in, perhaps a bit wistfully, the life of the world around him — he meets a family of four boys, ranging in age from about 5 to 12, and their widowed mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet). He and Porthos entertain the boys with an impromptu circus show (it really amounts to little more than Porthos’ ability to prop himself on his hind legs for a few minutes, but Barrie sets off the routine with a heck of a windup, which makes all the difference). And aside from the fact that Barrie is taken with their mother (she is, after all, the lustrous, wholly alive Kate Winslet — how could he resist her?), he enjoys the children so much that he arranges to meet them again the next day.

Before long, he’s having tea at their modest house, tranforming their defiantly English garden into fantastical imaginary wonderlands — a sun-parched wild, wild West, for example, where cowboys and Indians lurk. The children take to him almost immediately, except for Peter (Freddie Highmore), a sensitive kid who has been hit harder by his father’s death than his brothers have. Peter is at first wary of the new family friend, but before long, he’s won over by Barrie’s offhanded charm, sensible reassurances, and, most of all, his insistence that the imagination is the most powerful tool any of us has got.

And so before long, Barrie has the idea for his next play, “Peter Pan,” which was inspired by his new friends but also grew out of his desire to amuse and entertain them. Forster writes that out in letters much larger than necessary, intercutting theatrical fantasy scenes (Barrie, the boys and their mother dressed as pirates and shipmates on a ship rolling on a sea of wooden waves that looks like part of an elaborate stage set) with reality (the five, in less elaborate costumes and without stage makeup, scampering around the grounds of Barrie’s country home). Forster pulls off one starkly beautiful effect: As the Barries open the doors to their separate bedrooms after a passively bitter argument, Mary steps into darkness, while beyond James’ door we see a forest of sunlit greenery. It’s a wonderful stroke of shorthand that underscores the differences in the way these characters see the world.

Mostly, though, the fantasy sequences only distract from the impact of the “real-life” ones. Forster doesn’t know how to make his story flow — the picture moves from scene to scene with an almost painfully mechanical precision. But “Finding Neverland” often feels like a better movie than it is, simply because there’s always Depp to watch. The point of casting him, obviously, is that he’s the perfect embodiment of a boyish man who steadfastly remains young at heart.

But Depp is too subtle an actor to play that boy-man in the most obvious ways. What’s moving about him is the way he shows how hanging onto the most precious parts of childhood also means opening yourself wide to the uncertainty and suffering of being young. We all know people who are considered “young at heart” because they put on rubber clown noses at Halloween or squirt people with water guns at family picnics. Depp’s Barrie is the exact opposite of that. His delight in make-believe isn’t an escape from the melancholia of childhood: He sees the delight and the sadness as necessary sides of the same coin. (That also helps explain why “Peter Pan” is such an unsettling, eerie work — a dream version of the wonders of childhood as told by someone who hasn’t shaken the spell of its dark weirdness.)

Depp is particularly wonderful with the child actors here. Barrie accords the boys the respect that would be due such miniature Edwardian adults, but he’s also keyed in to their troubles and fears — Depp knows how to convey that without talking down either to his fellow actors or to us. And the role makes perfect use of his charm and beauty.

In that early scene in the park, he gets Porthos, a grand, furry fellow, to dance with him not by barking a command but looking into his eyes and pleading, “Dance with me!” Paw to shoulder, the man and his dog perform their clumsily poetic two-step. Forster films it badly (and cuts away to one of those persistent fantasy sequences), but we see enough of it to get the idea. We know we’re watching one of the most innately graceful actors — spiritually and physically — of his generation, a performer whose commitment to a role always extends to drawing out the best in the actors around him. Even when they’re dogs.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
333 points334 points | 93 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
60 points61 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
31 points32 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
31 points32 points | 2 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
29 points30 points | 1 comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations