Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland: 2004 Cross-Dressing as 1904

Marc Forster's Finding Neverland retraces the inspiration for Peter Pan to the friendship of its author, Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), with the rambunctious, fatherless Llewelyn Davies boys whom he meets one day in London's Kensington Gardens. To me the movie engages in this work of literary history with an intellectually soporific reverence for its subject. I don't care about Peter Pan that much, but I'd find the movie's awe tedious even if it were retracing the inspiration for A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest.

The script engages in the most tiresome form of dramatic irony, when Dustin Hoffman as Charles Frohman, the theatrical producer Barrie works with, voices serious reservations about the new play manuscript both on artistic and commercial grounds. It's tiresome because the moviemakers so clearly believe the audience will "know" Frohman was wrong. His harumphing during rehearsals constitutes what I think of as the "Rembrandt, this is madness!" aspect of artist biographies (after a bad moment in the 1936 British biopic starring Charles Laughton). The artist is busy on a work the audience knows is a masterpiece and someone tells him that the innovations we now prize him for are "madness." This turns biography into hagiography: the subject isn't a mere artist working through his aesthetic ideas, he's Christ among the doubters and Pharisees. (As if the canon of great art were a matter of revelation transmitted across the generations rather than a neverending communal exercise of discrimination. This isn't limited to artist biographies: the entire plot of The Miracle Worker involves Annie Sullivan producing a miracle to convince Helen's unbelieving father of the rightness of her educational approach.)

But it's fundamentally false in another way as well. Artists adapt the traditions at hand to their expressive needs, and this process is more interesting to contemplate--in no small part because it's pretty much always the truth--than thinking of them as creating a wholly original work out of nothing. (Such contemplation is one of the less immediate, conceptual benefits of a blockbuster retrospective of an idiosyncratic stylist like Piet Mondrian or Jackson Pollock.)

In the case of Barrie and Peter Pan, even a glancing survey of the history of the English theater will tell you that, however imaginative, Barrie's play falls within the conventions of Christmas pantomime, starting with the cross-dressing Principal Boy fighting the forces of evil and including the audience participation to revive Tinker Bell. (Click here for a discussion of whether Peter Pan, which opened at the end of December in 1904, is technically a Christmas pantomime, as some hold.) The way Barrie drew inspiration from the Llewelyn Davies boys appears to be accurate enough in Finding Neverland, allowing for some major modifications. For example, their father was alive when Barrie befriended the family. (Click here for Terry Windling's article in The Endicott Studio about Barrie and the "lost" Llewelyn Davies boys.) But in the movie Barrie's transformation of their inspiration into a theatrical offering is far more myth than history.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog