Ostensibly the story of the inspiration behind Scottish playwright JM Barrie’s most famous work Peter Pan this movie is really more about the choices we make, about inspiration versus convention, about the fantastic versus the ordinary, about hope versus hopelessness.
In a chilly marriage with a woman more attuned to social status than her own internal life, James Barrie (Johnny Depp) dwells more in his imagination than in the present world. The failure of his most recent play has given him pause but he finds both solace and purpose in entertaining the four Llewelyn Davies boys and their mother Sylvia (Kate Winslet). Much to the scandal of London society and the increasing perturbation of his wife Mary (Radha Mitchell), Barrie begins spending long afternoons with the boys and their mother, even going so far as to offer the widow and her children the use of his summer cottage.
Drawing on his afternoons with George, Jack, Peter, and Michael, Barrie pens the play Peter Pan which is staged even as Sylvia’s health is declining and as his wife Mary leaves him. The play was, of course, a smashing success and has become part of western culture, so deeply imbedded in fact that American psychologists have used the title as a touchstone to name a behavioral syndrome.
What sets this movie apart is not its wonderful production values, nor its dead on performances from all the participants, Mitchell, in particular, is spot on as a woman who knows she isn’t getting what she wants from her marriage but has no idea how to change her relationship. No, what sets this movie apart is the way in which the journeys into the fantasy world Barrie creates for the boys are handled. The mechanics and production values on the pirate ship Barrie imagines with the children and their mother could have been done to death with CGI and other modern film methods. Instead, they appear to the viewer in the cinema as they might have been imagined by someone familiar only with the technology available in the early 1900s. Finding Neverland includes excellent but essentially bit performances by Kelly MacDonald (Gosford Park and Trainspotting) and Dustin Hoffman (most recently Meet The Fockers and I (heart) Huckabees). Julie Christie turns in an excellent performance, as well, as Mrs. Emma du Maurier, Sylvia’s mother, in a role that could very easily have succumbed to the lure of stereotype.
For its excellent production values, fabulous performances from all involved, and because it is so very important that we all believe, I’m giving this movie 4 popcorns out of 5.
