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.
For a less literal-minded approach to literary historic anecdote, watch Gavin Millar's Dreamchild (1985), from a script by Dennis Potter. In Dreamchild the aged Alice Liddell comes to realize the emotion the Reverend Charles Dodgson had invested in telling stories to amuse her and her sisters some seventy years earlier (which he developed and published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll). Like Finding Neverland it lays its foundation over literary excavations into the origins of a famous work of fantasy; unlike Finding Neverland, however, it erects a new structure of its own atop that foundation. Dreamchild stands intriguingly to the side of Carroll's Alice books and works of psychosexual speculation about the author. Finding Neverland overvalues Peter Pan as a flight of fancy but would never itself be mistaken for one, even though it's as much romance as fact.
![Dreamchild [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/217FQMY53WL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
fascinating and intricate as always, thanks Alan. I haven't seen this yet (rarely do until they're out on DVD and cable), but I think I have a higher opinion of Depp's acting than you do: I thought he showed both exceptional comedic characterization and timing in Pirates, which due to having a swashbuckling 5 year-old daughter, I have seen many times. I appreciate the line he is able to walk between the broad and the subtle a little more each time, which is a very good sign.
I totally agree with your take on "torturously drab" 21 Grams, which just about killed me to watch, and about Penn in general, who I last found highly amusing in Fast Times.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. My problem writing about Depp is that he's so very likeable, not to mention pretty, I find myself disarmed as a critic. So I have to struggle back to reason and I guess what I was trying to describe were the limitations of likeability. I don't think he has the whipcrack way with comedy of, say,
George Clooney in Intolerable Cruelty. He barely seems like an adult. But I do agree with you that he's getting subtler. I hope I made clear that his exchanges with Radha Mitchell in this movie are superbly pointed. (Did your daughter like him in Before Night Falls? Just kidding.)
Penn is a trial when he's self-serious, always better with humor mixed in. He was generation-defining in Fast Times, but I've liked him more recently than you, in Sweet and Lowdown.
3 - Eric Olsen
I completely agree with Depp's perpetual childlikeness, though I don't find him childish, he's quite serious as far as I can tell and he seems willing to go all the way with the "blank slate" style of acting, which is either very brave or some kind of surrender.
And my daughter likes Jack, but she likes Will better in Pirates. BTW, I thought Orli was quite surprisingly good in that, showing much broader range than as Super Elf
4 - Alan Dale
The idea of "surrender" is interesting. To the director? He really is a visionary director's creature--Tim Burton, for instance.
As for Orlando Bloom, how's this for an unpopular opinion: I don't think anyone in the Ring movies will become a movie star. Jackson used the actors in limited, repetitive ways, but apart from Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen they're pretty limited to begin with. (Maybe why Jackson cast them.) Does Viggo Mortensen have a second expression? I thought Sean Bean was impressive in the first one and Brad Dourif in the second but most of the cast was outacted by a special effect. Ouch.