The acting honors thus go to Winslet, fully intuitive in a way Depp isn't. Her forthright, appraising gaze framed in that handsome face suggests, as it did in Iris and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both an openness to experience and a definite, personal way of taking it in.

It just seems a little late in the day to be lamenting Edwardian repression. As adeptly and tastefully as the emotions are elicited, they're conceived of in a way that constantly threatens to revert from naturalism to melodrama. (Possibly the result of the movie's having been adapted from a play, Allan Knee's The Man Who Was Peter Pan.) Would anybody in the audience second the icy Mrs. Barrie's social ambitions? One of the picture's best fantastic touches comes when the Barries open the doors of their adjacent bedrooms--hers onto a void and his onto a sunlit garden. Unfortunately this touch also reinforces the melodrama: good husband, bad wife. (Why should modern audiences be pushed like in-laws to take sides in a dissolving marriage? Failed marriages aren't referendums on the spouses' personalities, with a winner and a loser. From a disinterested point-of-view the problem isn't what the wife cares about but that she and her husband care about different things.)

As for that crisply domineering mother, Christie now has a theatrical command that she didn't when she was young, but we're not asked to respect the mother's power that the actress can now quite regally display. Nor are the moviemakers able to imagine what value there would be in having a maternal guarddog at the gate. In fact, the mother is granted entrance to our good graces only when she apologizes for her formidable personality at the end. This frees us to dismiss her intentions for her widowed daughter and fatherless grandsons, from the perspective of our "correct" 2004 convictions about marriage and love and family and money.

Finding Neverland thus bemoans the falseness and stiffness of Edwardian family life without capturing it authentically. There's a lot of talk about grieving that sounds pretty contemporary, for instance, just as Mitchell is too thin to have been considered beautiful in 1904. Which is to say, the script doesn't work through the tensions between 1904 desires and propriety in 1904 terms (as Henry James's The Golden Bowl does so magnificently).

Some of this may be quibbling, especially since the movie can't help but be affecting in the passages dealing with the two-stage orphaning of the boys, and it will probably function in a straightforwardly representative way for people who are fond of Peter Pan and even for people who just like playing with kids and dogs. But it doesn't do well by its more complex ambitions: it needs to nail down the corseted, parched rigidity of the era's bourgeois mores in order to show how strong the pressure is in the direction of imaginative release for a well-behaved fantasist like Barrie.

Perhaps the moviemakers approach the subject too literally. It may be that connecting the familiar characters and props from the play to situations in Barrie's life at the time, in essence decrypting the play for us, isn't the best way to dramatize Barrie's need to transform the too-real into the unreal. This detective-like approach can be rewarding in literary criticism, although it requires an unwavering fidelity to facts and a familiarity with the tradition the artist worked within that Finding Neverland lacks. (The approach also seems to bait our attention with will-o'-the-wispy Peter Pan and then switch him for his mortal author and his unrequited love story.) As drama, the movie offers only clichés about Barrie's creative gift and its sources, which presumably preceded his acquaintance with the Llewelyn Davies family and existed apart from Peter Pan. Finding Neverland moved me at times but didn't transport me, either to Edwardian London in the first instance, or from there to Neverland.