Wow.

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2005)

In 1998 there was some serious controversy over the Best Picture Oscar, which was a toss-up between Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love. My position was that while Saving Private Ryan is inarguably one of the greatest war films ever made, Shakespeare in Love was a historical epic that managed to tell an in-depth story about Shakespeare's life that is not necessarily historically accurate, but accurate as far as what very little is known about Shakespeare himself. It was a story that was built upon theories of what may have happened in his life to lead him to write the plays that he wrote, and the movie took us back to that time in his life and told an incredible story which makes perfect sense as far as the content of his plays. It was almost like time travel the connections were so sharp. Finding Neverland takes something of the same tactic, tying in people from J.M. Barrie's life to the characters that he created in his plays.
Granted, this took place in the early 20th Century and not the early 17th Century, as in Shakespeare's case, and much more is know about Barrie's life than Shakespeare's, but the film tells such a moving and beautiful story that it reinvents the Peter Pan legend, which has by now become such an enduring classic that it almost seems like the vast majority of people alive today grew up on it. It brightened the childhoods of innumerable people, and this brilliant film breathes new life into the story.
I've heard numerous criticisms of the film that I don't care to acknowledge or dignify, and surely there are countless reviewers and critics who think they're clever by pointing out the connection between the title of the movie and Michael Jackson's recent lawsuits. I've seen and heard many such comments, and I am always struck by what an efficient method it is for a person to cheapen a great movie and, at the same time, to clearly illustrate their own intellectual shallowness and utter lack of anything important or interesting to say.
Johnny Depp fits flawlessly into the role of Barrie, a man who struggled to make a career as a playwright writing plays that he thought the lawyers and doctors in his audience wanted to see, before finally just writing what he believed in with the people in mind that he wanted to entertain  children. He was indeed a pioneer of children's literature, which is why it comes as a surprise to me that people are so quick to jump to conclusions about his interest in children and their entertainment. He was a child at heart, and the children saw him as one of their own. One of the first things that I learned when I studied Children's Literature at the University level was that it is adults, NOT children, that impose sexual meaning onto children's stories. Countless examples can be found in Alice in Wonderland, for example, and have also tarnished the reputation of Walt Disney himself.
Classics of children's literature invariably come from people who spend the majority of their time concerned with entertaining children, and I'm thrilled to see that there are still major filmmakers and actors who can see that and look beyond things like the Michael Jackson scandals, which themselves may or may not be true. Personally, I think it is at least as likely that Michael Jackson is either completely insane and literally thinks he's a child himself or that he harbors the same interest in children that Barrie did, which was a completely harmless connection with his inner child, something that the vast majority of adults in the world could use more of.
I heard of a study that concluded that children smile something like 200 times a day, while adults smile something like six times a day. That's exactly the kind of thing about which a movie like Finding Neverland is designed to remind us all. When we meet Barrie he is pacing backstage at the opening night of one of his plays, which turns out to be a tremendous flop. He's sitting in the park not long after, mulling over his failed effort, and meets the boys about which his classic play Peter Pan ultimately becomes based upon.
The adventures that Barrie and these boys, as well as their mother, have, become the fascinating tour through the life of one of the most creative and fascinating minds in literary history. Finding Neverland is a biography, of sorts, and while the term Inspired by True Events may be the one that describes a story that is based very loosely on a true story, any creative liberties taken with Barrie's life serve only to make his story into more of a captivating fairy tale than it might otherwise have been. The conclusion of the film, for example, where Neverland appears in the boys' house to the wondrous delight of their sick mother is unlikely, but rarely are creative liberties taken with greater success. The only dry eyes in the house, as they say, will indeed be found in the heads of the audience members who display the same bitter frigidness as the grandmother in this movie.
And here is the most interesting thing about the way the movie is structured and designed  If you find yourself completely unmoved by it, then it is you that the movie is designed to inspire.
Bravo.