Finding Neverland Focuses on all the Wrong Points

Rating: 6/10 (30 April 2005)

Plot: 13/25: Sir JM Barrie (Depp) is a playwright who is having trouble finding inspiration. His latest play was a complete flop, and the stage director Charles Frohman (Hoffman) is breathing down his neck for something new. Meanwhile, his marriage to social-wannabe Mary Ansell Barrie (Mitchell) is falling apart. While out walking his dog in the park, he meets four young boys, Michael (Spill), George (Roud), Jack (Prospero) and Peter (Highmore) and their widowed mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Winslet). He befriends the children and their mother, becoming a new friend and a new father rolled up into one. Peter, however, does not accept Barrie, and acts too grown up for his age. These children become the inspiration for his next play, about a child who does not want to grow up.
Meanwhile, because of his newfound friendship with the family, there are rumours going around about him cheating on his wife with Sylvia, and worse rumours about him and the children. The sequences about Barrie's social life taking a pitfall are much more interesting than the children from a story perspective. The movie tries to evoke too many emotions with the children, especially Peter. More scenes about Barrie's social life and marriage crumbling would have prevented this movie from being just attempting to evoke sympathy.
Visual Effects/Directing: 23/25: I'll admit, the really brilliant part of Barrie's scenes with the children is the exceptional. When Barrie is playing with the children, we are treated to see deep inside the imagination of the group, and seeing it cut away from the land of imagination and back to the real world is done masterfully. The effects are brilliant, really bringing you into Barrie's world, though the final Neverland effect is more confusing than artistic. Overall, though, the effects are fairly astonishing. Maybe not technically, but artistically.
Acting: 20/25: Johnny Depp, what can one say about him? He has shot off like wildfire ever since his incredible performance in Pirates of the Caribbean, and now I cannot walk down the street without hearing about him. This is for a good reason. Depp has quickly become one of the best actors working today, and FN is no exception for him. He truly becomes JM Barrie in every way, a man who is still a child at heart.
There has been a lot of buzz about Freddie Highmore (Two Brothers) in this film, but I personally do not believe he lives up to it. Well, he does seem good, but mainly because the other three children are all so annoying (especially Michael) that Highmore stands out as being the only one I can listen to without having my head explode in three separate directions. Winslet (Titanic) is good, but not as good as she has shown in Eternal Sunshine, which she was rightly given her Oscar nomination for over this. Hoffman (Rain Man) is good, but he is in more of a cameo role than anything else.
Overall, the acting is good, but those kids are so incredibly annoying I had to mark it down.
Entertainment: 13/25: Finding Neverland could have been better, but instead of trying to be a look into the crumbling of JM Barrie's social world or about simply how he was inspired, it tries to reach out of the screen and yank at the heartstrings. This is just what some people want, but it seems to try too hard to evoke sadness when it should be inspiring or intriguing. It has a lot of potential, and lives up to some of it, but it could have been better.
Total: 69%: Finding Neverland could have been a lot more. It shows vast potential, but is focused on all the wrong things. Sure, it is good for tugging at heartstrings, but it does so forcefully by making you sympathetic. It could have been better, but is still well-acted and very well directed, so this is not a complete waste.