Neverland and Oz

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2004)

This is not a great film but in the cacophony of cinematic noise, I find it hard to complain about a sweetly sentimental film that deals intelligently with the question of how to face life and then death. Johnny Depp is probably the finest actor of his generation because of his ability to find poetry and whimsy in his characters while remaining a strong, confident screen presence. Kate Winslett is a luminous presence and fine actress in her own right. They boys are exceptional, especially Freddie Highmore, who plays the troubled child Barrie based Peter upon.
The thing that holds the movie back from greatness is the sub-plots. Barries' wife and Winslett's mother are both stiff, unimaginative people who are unable to go where Barrie can go and seem to dislike him for it. Mary Barrie, (Rahda Mitchell), seems more interested in social climbing and Emma Du Maurier, (Julie Christie wants to protect her daughter from the riffraff. It's not very interesting.
The film occasionally moves from reality to fantasy without recognizing any borders between the two. In that sense it resembles 'Big Fish', which did this more aggressively and is more enjoyable. More time in 'Neverland' rather than an occasional stroboscopic visit would have been nice.
Another film people might want to see if they liked this one is the TV movie 'The Dreamer of Oz', about Barrie's American contemporary, L. Frank Baum, who, according to that film, created Oz as a place for his beloved, (and deceased ) niece Dorothy to reside. It's always interested me that Barrie and Baum had different conclusions at the end of their stories. Barrie held that remaining stuck in 'reality' was a prison sentence and that we needed to fly off to find ourselves. Baum, who traveled far and wide looking for happiness only to wish he was back in his home town of Chittenango, concluded that for all our longings, there is no place like home.