A rare film of beauty. *Many spoilers*

Rating: 10/10 (18 December 2004)

Finding Neverland is easily one of the best pictures of recent years, and certainly the best of its type.
The movie's greatest achievement is that it either forgoes the standard clichés or uses them very subtly. First is the humour. Films of this type often go overboard, but not this one, it doesn't go for cheap (Or cute) humour. It does have humorous parts, but they are few and it did not put them in at the expense of the plot.
It also is above going for cheap emotions, it earns its sadness and it's happiness, it doesn't go for cheap manufactured Hallmark card sadness or cotton-candy happiness.
At one point it dawns on Barrie to invite 25 children, mostly orphans, to the opening of his play. On the outside this seems like something from Patch Adams, but the movie ignores the standard clichés, and this doesn't seem manufactured.
Another cliché they ignored was the standard "You're not my father." Scene which is inevitable in any movie with children without a father. While pretending to be Indians, Barrie does call Peter his son, and Peter does stop pretending and he does tell Barrie, "You're not my father." And run off, but that's the only time you see it. The film never brings it up again because it's quite clear Barrie doesn't want to be the children's father.
Child actors are usually hit or miss, but the children in this film were excellent. There are times in which the boy who plays Peter even outshines Johnny Depp.
During a play Peter wrote for his mother and Barrie, the mother goes into a fit of coughing and the doctor has to be called, Peter runs outside and starts demolishing the set. Barrie tells the boy that his mother claims that it's only a chest cold and that she'll be okay. But Peter went through this with his father already and tells Berrie, "I will not be a made a fool of!" He then recounts how is mother told him his father was going to take the family fishing in a few weeks, and how his father then died the very next night.
The film manages to seamlessly integrate reality and fantasy. When Barrie and the children play, it switches back and forth between reality and fantasy, one moment the children are standing against a tree and Barrie is dressed as a pirate, the next they are tied to a ship on the sea and he's cutting them loose in exchange for them agreeing to be pirates. This manages to be more believable than Robin Williams filling a tank with spaghetti, because they don't ask you to suspend your disbelief, they tell you that it's just make-believe.
But the movie is anything but a fantasy, it's most likely the most realistic of its kind because it gives you a realistic ending, not manufactured, and not something you see in major movies anymore.
The saddest scene comes when the mother is close to dying, she tells Berrie that she would once like him to take her to Neverland, so the next time he sees her when she is very sick, he brings the actors from his play to the house and they recreate the play in the house. The walls open up and Neverland is revealed, people are flying, there is Captain Hook, the alligator, mermaids, fairies. The mother walks out into Neverland in a flowing gown. It's an incredibly sad scene, but it's also happy. My first thought was that this was the ending, and even though it was unrealistic, I would have had no problems with it ending right there. But it isn't the ending, the movie flashes forward to the mother's funeral. Peter runs off, Barrie follows, he finds Peter sitting on a bench, they talk about his mother. Barrie tells him that his mother isn't gone if he believes he's there. You see Barrie and Peter together on the bench, and they start to fade transparent. The ending was one of the most beautiful I've seen, no happy ending, no sad ending, just an ending, a perfect ending, an ending that you rarely in mainstream modern films.