The movie that never grew up.

Rating: 3/10 (26 February 2005)

*Finding Neverland*, though competently done, is a pretty much dishonest movie through and through, in terms of the historical situation of its story (for instance, Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies was NOT a widow in 1903-04 when *Peter Pan* was produced, but was married to a fellow who naturally found Barrie's intrusion into the life of his family deeply offensive and disturbing) and, even worse, in terms of Barrie's creative processes. This movie (based on a recent London stage play called *The Man Who Was Peter Pan* by someone-or-other) would have us believe that J.M. Barrie -- an otherwise "normal", relatively successful playwright -- finally was able to encapsulate, in his writing, the virtues of childhood after bumping into Sylvia and her family at Kensington Park. And thus, Barrie rediscovers those childhood virtues for an increasingly cynical modern world.
This makes for an uncontroversial, user-friendly, Oscar-nominated sort of movie, but it's really little better than rubbish. It's one thing to take liberties with real characters and events in order to forge a coherent narrative, but *Finding Neverland* reinvents Barrie and his milieu out of whole cloth. What's the point of that? It certainly renders much of the film's action incomprehensible: Barrie's producer (Dustin Hoffman), for instance, is depicted here as deeply doubtful about the prospects for *Peter Pan*, and yet he agrees to stage it anyway. In the movie's universe, why would he? -- it doesn't make any sense. It becomes more clear when we recall the childhood-fetishism that was rampant in Edwardian England at the time (Robert Louis Stevenson's tales for young readers, and the work of Beatrix Potter, spring immediately to mind). Of COURSE a producer would be attracted to something like *Peter Pan* in 1904. But this movie presents Barrie as an iconoclast who wins converts.
As for Barrie's personal life, the movie makes it equally senseless. There's no clear reason why the writer (personified by the very handsome Johnny Depp) wouldn't make any obviously natural overtures to widow Sylvia (a gorgeous Kate Winslet). Of course, he'd be cheating on his own wife, but the movie isn't quite prepared to make Barrie a saint or a monk. (He IS married in the movie, after all.) In real life, Barrie was something of an actress-chaser who, ironically, may have been sexually impotent -- if one may believe his fiction, and one should, for that is where writers really tell their autobiographies. *Finding Neverland* elides all of this, with the result that his relationship with Sylvia doesn't pass the credibility test. Compounding the problem is that the movie doesn't dare confront just how hung-up Barrie was over the death of his brother David, or the resulting Oedipus complex that followed with regard to his mother. We get a quick speech tossed off by Depp -- "My brother died; my mother never got over it; I dressed in his clothes one night to make her happy" (paraphrasing, of course) -- that does not begin to explain Barrie's obsession with the Llewelyn-Davies kids and with kid-hood in general. I normally agree with the notion that "psychologizing" famous people, artists especially, is a cheap trick that simplifies more than it explains; but here's a case in which the author's own writings give us troubling clues with which the movie avoids dealing. *Finding Neverland* doesn't even consider that the idea of a Boy Who Never Grows Up could be a disturbing one. Sadness and loss are treated here as the dismal adjuncts of growing up . . . when they SHOULD have been the dismal adjuncts of a man's refusal to grow up. I just don't understand why praise has been heaped onto this movie. Perhaps in 2005, Americans feel so dispirited that an infantilizing entertainment such as this seems irresistible. We should resist it, though: among other things, adulthood can be defined as the state in which a person is capable of dealing with life's problems. We cannot afford to be babied in these times, even within the context of pop culture.
3 stars out of 10.