Finding Neverland is lovely child's play.

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2005)

Finding Neverland (2004) Finding Neverland is lovely child's play. It depicts the creation of the play Peter Pan by its author Sir James Matthew Barrie. The film opens with us watching Barrie's most recent play, an awful flop. Soon after he befriends a family of 4 boys recently bereaved by the death of their father, meeting them in the park as he struggles to write a new play. The remainder of the film depicts how the relationship Barrie forms with this family becomes the inspiration for his next play, Peter Pan.
Barrie tries to bring the gaiety of imagination to this family, especially to Peter, the boy most grieved. As Barrie plays with the boys, inventing game after game of imaginative adventure we are privileged with the wonder of Barrie's private Neverland. Neverland (a place where dogs are bears, pirates and Indians roam, and believing in something makes it so) is a private imaginative space Barrie has been creating for years, perhaps since his own boyhood; or perhaps it is the imagination of his boyhood never lost, while the rest of us adults have. And this is Barrie's blessing and curse. Like Peter Pan, he is an adult never having completely left childhood - lost in adult society. But the magic Barrie invents for these children by sharing Neverland nourishes the boys and their mother back from their despair.
The genius of this film, like the genius of Peter Pan, is the audience's uncertainty and wonderment about whether this is a kids' story or one written for adults. And of course Peter's answer would be  there need not be a difference.
It is difficult to write about this gem of a film without it sounding completely saccharine. But the director succeeds by coaxing outstanding performances, and employing his magical visual expressiveness (showing the world Barrie and the children have imagined) with subtly and at the perfect times. Where other storytellers would have produce sentimental slop, every pang of grief, or expression of care or childish wonder rings genuine.
Which is not say there are not many emotionally charged, tearful moments - there are. Scenes, such as Barrie telling the youngest boy he must believe the kite will fly before it will, when he tells the oldest boy he had suddenly grown-up in the instant just past before his eyes (when George wants to know the truth about his mother's illness), and the lines in Peter Pan explaining how the first laugh from the first baby broke into 1000 pieces, each one becoming a fairy, all cause tears to well. Like I said, it sounds like absolute emotional swill. And probably in the hands of a different director and without Johnny Depp's performance it would have been. But for my money the emotional tenor remains genuine throughout. (The exception being the film's dénouement after the boys' mother dies of tuberculosis, in which Depp and Julie Christy make nice to raise the boys together. This is the one moment which felt like a Hollywood tack-on.) Johnny Depp has chosen another perfect role for himself (or is it he performed perfectly another role?). He is quietly one of the smartest actors on screen today. Dustin Hoffman seems to be enjoying himself immensely playing Charles Frohman the American financial backer to Depp's Barrie. And it is very fun to see Julie Christy as Mrs. Emma du Maurier, the authoritarian, proper Victorian grandma.
Should you see it? If you need your heart warmed Finding Neverland will leave you toasty.