Do You Believe in Fairies?

Rating: 8/10 (11 August 2005)

How fine is the line between fantasy and reality? And if we unleash our imaginations, just how far will they take us? These are two questions explored by Marc Foster's beautiful "Finding Neverland." JM Barrie is a lonely author stuck in a loveless marriage to a social-climbing wife and a suffocating world of adult primness until he finds creative muses  four of them, to be exact  in young brothers George, Jack, Peter, and Michael Davies. Though he also strikes up an instant friendship with their beautiful widowed mother Sylvia (Kate Winslet), it is clear that her sons are the real magnet. With his powerful imagination, Barrie creates a series of magical adventures for the boys ... until Sylvia's failing health and eventual death intrude upon their world of make-believe.
The weepy scenes are many, but there are definitely laughs in-between. In one scene, Barrie is asleep in bed with a tuft of blondish hair under the covers beside him, assumed to be his wife until the covers are thrown back to reveal his brilliant pet dog, Porthos. (Besides changing his breed from St. Bernard to Newfoundland, the movie took almost no liberties with Porthos.) Earlier, Barrie commands Porthos to stand on his hind legs, takes hold of his paws, and says in the most passionate, serious voice, "Dance with me!" I don't know how Johnny Depp did it without laughing! The two share a merry waltz in the middle of the park. Throughout the film, Depp's Barrie manages to keep his feet on the ground while his head is in the clouds, but in real life, Barrie's overactive imagination often gave him problems in distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Though Depp is brilliant as usual, he is nearly acted off-screen by young Freddie Highmore, whose ability to convey so many powerful emotions through a single glance or sigh is simply amazing. His glowing performance makes it crystal clear why Barrie chooses Peter as the namesake of his greatest masterpiece, the boy who never grew up. Though Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman), Barrie's grudging producer, is skeptical throughout the film that "Peter Pan" will be a hit  even calling it "my nightmare" on opening night  its instant success soon eclipses Barrie's recent theater flops. It would later go onto eclipse his forty other plays and dominate his life, but that's a depressing tale for another time. (In real life, Frohman was devoted to making Peter Pan a hit, and Barrie was the one full of doubt.) At a private performance of the play for the Davies family, Peter Pan turns to them and asks the famous plea to clap their hands. The four boys are all too awestruck to clap ... until their stuffy grandmother, who has spent the entire movie disapproving of Barrie and his fun with the boys, positively bangs her hands together to save Tinkerbell's life. More than anything, her actions capture the magical spell that "Peter Pan" still holds over any audience. I was clapping my hands, too. The movie truly made me believe.
Look closely and you will spot an actual member of the Davies family. In reality, there was a fifth Davies brother, Nicholas, called Nico, born in 1903. Nico married in 1926 and welcomed his only child, Laura, in 1928. Laura appears in "Finding Neverland." Just after the first performance of "Peter Pan," she is the theater patron who says to Freddie Highmore (playing her real-life uncle), "This is Peter Pan! How wonderful!" She is credited under her married name, Laura Duguid. I would like to add that I have read several biographies of JM Barrie, beginning since long before this movie was released, and that the rumors of pedophilia are totally untrue. Barrie loved the Davies children platonically, not sexually, and both of the boys's parents considered him a friend  though they were sometimes bewildered by the author's oddities, and quite understandably so.