Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland: 2004 Cross-Dressing as 1904 - Page 2

As for the rest--Barrie's longing for Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the boys' widowed mother, despite his own marriage, her mother's determination to get her remarried respectably, and her terminal illness--such pleasure as this material gives comes from the actors. Johnny Depp as Barrie, Kate Winslet as Sylvia, Radha Mitchell as Barrie's wife, and Julie Christie as Sylvia's mother are highly skilled, and surprisingly nuanced. Nothing is ascetically underdone or coarsely overdone.

Depp's performance is, for him, unusually attuned to the details of the text, especially in Barrie's careful interactions with his wife. I say "unusually" because, as What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Donnie Brasco show, naturalistic character delineation is not generally his forte. Not that he's bad in those movies. He has too much delicacy to be bad bad, although he was pretty hopeless as the macho lieutenant in Before Night Falls and really weak as the homicidal writer in Secret Window. Unlike that other "face" Billy Crudup he's not a technical wiz, but he's probably too fastidious to get down with that proud amateur John Waters, to judge from Cry-Baby. Which is not to say he's too vain to go skanky. He does some truly memorable sketch acting as the transvestite Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, preserving his moue and barely fluttering his fake eyelashes as he removes the hero's five-part manuscript from his rectum.

Altogether Depp has been most memorable in puppety roles, whether grave like Edward Scissorhands or manic like Ed Wood. But even in Ed Wood and, though this is apparently a lonely opinion, in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Depp doesn't reveal a distinctive high comic style. His popularity in Pirates just shows that likeability and a fun-dad willingness to play the clown, which Finding Neverland similarly relies on, can serve in the place of timing and delivery.

Depp always gives his beautifully broad, angular face and an unblinking commitment to his roles, but the conception, not to say the costuming, does a lot of the work for him. His judiciousness in selecting roles isn't in finding challenges as an actor but in finding catchy roles suited to his limitations. You could say his range is limited but it's really his approach. Which is fine. He seems aware of, and comfortable with, his limitations, and because he chooses offbeat projects there's usually something besides the acting to pay attention to anyway. As an additional benefit, since his pictures tend to play into his pantomimic reserve, even when they're arty misfires the embarrassment doesn't stick to him, as it does, or should, to Sean Penn giving his earnest all to the purposely, torturously drab 21 Grams or The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

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 …

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