Of Fairies and the Ticking Crocodile (Being a Review of Finding Neverland, and Other Things Besides)
By David Hontiveros

Johnny Depp’s come a long way from A Nightmare on Elm Street and 21 Jump Street. He’s one of that rare breed of working actor who’s not just a celebrity, he’s also a talented, respected thespian. He manages to star in derivative Hollywood dreck like The Astronaut’s Wife and emerges virtually unscathed. He ended up on the Oscar shortlist, bizarrely enough, because of the film franchise he’s suddenly found himself a part of, Pirates of the Caribbean, a movie based on, of all things, an amusement park ride! He’s collaborated with Tim Burton three times, and has reunited with him for the long-awaited Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the stop-motion animation film Corpse Bride. And at the tail end of 2004, he found himself playing J.M. Barrie, the Scottish author and playwright who wrote Peter Pan, in Finding Neverland.

Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence.

It’s 1903, London, and Barrie is just coming off his latest play, a resounding flop. His marriage to former actress Mary Ansell (Radha Mitchell) is becoming increasingly strained and loveless. He’s a man in danger of losing himself, when a fateful expedition and romp with faithful hound Porthos, crosses his path with that of widow Sylvia Llewellyn Davies (Kate Winslet), and her sons, George, Michael, Jack, and Peter. What follows quite literally changes all their lives, and becomes the inspiration for Peter Pan.

Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) directs Neverland from a screenplay by David Magee, based on Allan Knee’s play “The Man Who Was Peter Pan.” Forster does a commendable job of handling this moving tale of growth and loss, of hope amidst pain, steering it clear of the overly maudlin, melodramatic waters that the usual Hollywood tear-jerker traverses.

The ingredients are there, after all. Four children bereft of their father. One in particular, Peter (Freddie Highmore), taking the death much harder than his siblings, withdrawing into himself, unwilling to play childish games of pretend. A mother beset by “chest colds.” A domineering grandmother (the still radiant Julie Christie as Davies’ mother, Mrs. Emma du Maurier). A troubled marriage. It’s all there, and yet Forster turns in a wondrously magical piece that not only evades TV movie of the week territory, but also makes believers of us all.

In Neverland, the harsh realities of life and the act of living are beautifully counterbalanced by Barrie’s fanciful view of the world, which turns an awkward dance with a dog into a stately fairy tale waltz. It’s to Forster’s credit that these sequences—often Barrie’s playtime with the Davies children—are transformed into subtly wondrous set pieces which are fantastical without being baroque or overly extravagant. In another director’s hands, the CGI would have run wild, the production design would have stolen centerstage. Instead, and paradoxically, the restraint effectively amplifies the wistful nature of these moments, fleeting as they are, like time, and fairy dust.

Odd things happen to all of us on our way through life without our noticing for a time that they have happened.

However, this being a film “Inspired By True Events,” some fudging is done, particularly with chronology. Whereas in the film, the initial encounter with Davies is in 1903, in reality Barrie met her and her children in 1897, while her husband Arthur was still alive. The events depicted in the latter section of Finding Neverland (which actually occurred in 1910) are likewise telescoped, and the 1902 publication of The Little White Bird—which mentions Peter Pan for the first time in print, before the play opened in 1904—isn’t even mentioned. Thus are the perhaps necessary pitfalls of the dramatization of real-life events. The slow, boring bits are excised, the drudgery of passing time erased, the terrible tick-tick of the crocodile, muted, so the pathos of the moment is magnified.

In cases like this, where history falls prey to drama, all you can hope for is that the spirit of the story is true to the lives of the people it depicts, and here, Forster and crew succeed admirably. Of Barrie’s fervent need to both rediscover a childhood he’d missed the first time around, and to ensure Peter doesn’t experience the same premature adulthood, pitted against the reality that that innocence we must treasure eventually flies away, oftentimes in a single, unheralded instant (the scene where Barrie acknowledges George’s passage into adulthood is a quiet, surprisingly moving moment); that, we are shown, in all its fragility and splendour.

And in the end, this is film after all (a rather good one, it should be emphasized), and not documentary. If facts are what one is after, there are biographies. Film, as with any story, is about drama, and about the paradox of finding truth within that fiction.

In that respect, Finding Neverland has much to impart, about pretense and truth, growth and change, and the possibilities of discovering one’s self in the face of loss.

“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.
“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.

Quotes from James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911).