You're never too old to be a child.

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2010)

Finding Neverland (2004), a film by Marc Forster and starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, and Julie Christie is primarily a story about imagination. What author J.M. Barrie showed us when he first presented his story, Peter Pan, to a London audience in 1904 was that you're never too old to be a child. Finding Neverland is the story of just how much that belief meant to Barrie, and how he lived that belief, day to day, in good times and bad. It's the story of his struggles as a playwrite, his ultimately failing marriage, and most importantly, his friendship with Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies (wonderfully played by Kate Winslet) - including her four young boys and her overbearing mother (Julie Christie) in the aftermath of her husband's death.
We first meet Depp's Barrie in the opening scene of the film as the playwrite anxiously awaits the opening curtain for his new play. You instantly know from the way he nervously titters about backstage, spying on the audience to see who has arrived and their reactions to the first act that Barrie isn't the typical stiff-upper-lip Englishman (Scottish, actually, but everyone knows that London is where you make your name in theatre). Indeed, even his nervousness comes across as childlike, as do his ramblings to the stagehand when he tries to pry from him his reaction to what ends up being a disaster of a play – a play which the stagehand hasn't even seen.
When Barrie first meets the Davies boys in a park, there is a near instant bond with all but young Peter (in a stunning debut by Freddie Highmore of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame). "It's just a bit of silliness," Peter often says derisively about Barrie's antics, though he doesn't refrain from joining in his games with his other brothers. Barrie's subtle, understated attempts to show Peter that "a bit of silliness" is okay. There's a poignant scene in the film where Barrie gifts Peter with a leather-bound journal in which to write his own stories, and Peter seems at a loss as to what to do with it. "Write about the talking whale," Barrie says to him. "What whale?" Peter asks, to which Barrie replies, "The one that's trapped in your imagination and desperate to get out." The tentative bond that eventually develops between Barrie and Peter, and separately between Barrie and Sylvia, is the heart of this film. While the lush scenery of London in the summertime, and the creative ways in which director Forster weaves fantasy in reality (brilliantly depicted in an early scene where the boys and Barrie are playing a game of cowboys and Indians in their back garden) are but backdrops (albeit seemingly integrated) to the ultimately bittersweet story of a newly formed family (Mr. Barrie eventually becomes Uncle Jim) – not through marriage or birth, but through friendship and affection, and the desire of one man to help a young boy remember that it is our imagination that keeps close to us the things we think are lost forever.
That Barrie has come into these boys lives while still grieving the loss of their father, and during a time that Barrie is struggling personally and professionally, seems to be one of those happy accidents that later proves to be a transformative moment in our lives. For Barrie, it is through young Peter that he finds the story that would go on to define Barrie for generations to come – that of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, Depp, Winslet, and director Marc Forster take a story that could have been an overly-saccharine disaster, and brought it to life in the same way that Barrie brought Peter and Wendy to life for the Llewellyn-Davies family, sharing the same time-tested truth that there is a child in all of us no matter how old we get.