Disappointed.

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2005)

Today I viewed the premiere of Finding Neverland and found it most disappointing.Entertaining?Yes...but very factually incorrect. Johnny Depp was pleasant, but too young,too attractive and too tall....with no sign of the pipe.
Barrie didn't meet a young widow, but,after meeting her, and also her boys in the Gardens,became very friendly with Sylvia and Arthur Llewellyn Davies.This friendship lasted for the 10 years until Arthur finally succumbed to his facial cancer, and on his deathbed, Lleyellyn Davies made Barrie promise to look after his boys and wife for the rest of their days. The film showed J.M. and the family sharing his country cottage, but did not show the fact that the whole family took a nearby house for the season and lived separately.
In the movie, Sylvia basically said she was in love with Barrie and they both admitted they expected it to go on forever. It has been suggested that Barrie tampered with her will to get control of the boys.
Factually, both Arthur and Sylvia trusted Barrie with their boys, and rightly so, and wanted him to oversee their futures. Any suggestion of impure thoughts towards them are disgusting.
When his wife left him and they eventually divorced, he was distraught....and lost.
The film does rightly show Barrie's sense of fun and tremendous imagination, but it should be remembered, and shown,that he had deep sense of empathy with many characters and "Peter Pan" was the only play of his to survive the years to be completely written for the "young at heart".