A different Depp, good enough to win an Oscar

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2005)

The year was 1987 when I for the first time saw Peter Pan performed on stage, at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-lake, Ontario, Canada. In complete ignorance, I marveled at how well they reproduce the fairy tale on stage, not knowing that a stage play was the very first form of Peter Pan's existence, in 1904.
Finding Neverland opens with the opening night of a play by James Mathew Barrie (Johnny Depp), a play that becomes an instant box office disaster, to the dismay of its financier Frohman (Dustin Hoffman, in a not much more than cameo role). One angle of looking at the movie could be as the story of how Barrie redeems himself to Frohman by conceiving, writing, and finally showcasing his next play Peter Pan, which turns out to be a roaring success. But that's missing the point..missing the WHOLE point actually.
Peter Pan is about keeping a promise, about believing, about making a dying dream come true, about pure selfless love. With so much goodness put together with such elegant and heartfelt filming, it is hard to find a dry eye in the cinema when the audience is brought to ending climax, when Neverland is found. Some may fault the actual entrance into Neverland as an overkill. However, the way to look at this scene is of course as something symbolic rather than real. It is a link between what Sylvia Davies (Kate Winslet) physically experiences in watching the play and what she mentally experiences in her final moments.
The journey in search of Neverland in a shared experience between Barrie and the Davies family (widow Sylvia and 4 boys). Shunning conventional society, Barrie finds immense pleasure in playing with the Davies kids who in turn become his muse for Peter Pan (one of the 4 kids is called Peter). Quite illuminating however is a scene during the intermission of the successful opening night, when the appreciative audience, upon hearing the name of Peter Davies, exclaim in mirth, "So you are Peter Pan". Without a moment's hesitation, the little boy replies in a matter-of-course manner, "No, he is Peter Pan", pointing at Barrie.
Winslet is excellent, particularly as the role she plays is not terribly challenging. Her Oscar nomination, therefore, is rather for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not a trace of Depp's characteristic eccentricity is seen in his portrayal of the gentle, sensible, courageous man who befriends this widow, not so much even out of kindness or charity, but purely as one human soul that happens to click with another. Hope he wins this year's Oscar.
There are two supporting roles. Julie Christie playing Sylvia's traditional-thinking mother is somewhat one-dimensional. Radha Mitchell, who seems to come from the same line as Jessica Lange and Robin Wright, is a delightful surprise playing Barrie's wife. Her two previous roles that I've seen, in Phone Booth and Man on Fire, were more straightforward. Playing Mary Ansell Barrie requires some depth to avoid making it one-dimensional like Christie's character. Mitchell's underplaying the character is successful in making it believable and even sympathy-earning.
From what I've heard of other contestants, Finding Neverland does not seem to have a good chance of bringing home the Oscar. But it certainly deserves its place "with the rest of them, and the best of them" (Barbara Streisand in "Hello Dolly").