Fantasia on the Life of James M. Barrie

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2005)

I love this movie. I really do. I've seen it multiple times and will try to see it again before it leaves theaters. But it needs a different title: it should be called "Finding Neverland: A Fantasia Loosely Based on the Life of James Barrie." It is not the life of James Barrie, nor the life of those four (five) boys and their mother. Most of the factual errors of the script have already been pointed out in these comments, but I'll reiterate those that to me seem most egregious: Barrie was an interloper in the family, never really accepted, a surrogate father only in his own mind (heart); much of his acceptance by the family was based on his pocketbook; Sylvia did NOT name him as guardian after her death. His relationship with Sylvia and Arthur's family was always uneasythe movie locates the source of this stress solely in Sylvia's mother (the Julie Christie character), but unfairly. There is no evidence that Mary was a frigid social-climber. Barrie was emotionally damaged himself but (probably) harmless. He was small and peculiar-looking. Of the five Llewelyn-Davies boys, one died at 19 in a suspicious drowning accident at Oxford (suspicious because it might have been a suicide--I believe this was Michael, Barrie's favorite); one was killed in World War I; Peter committed suicide in 1960.
Johnny Depp as James Barrie is Barrie as we might have liked to see him, the Barrie we might wish for in our own dreams, no more real than Peter Pan. This movie also gives those boys the childhood we might like to see--and the promise for them of long, non-tragic, and creative lives.
But it is a pleasure to see the fantasy, and as a fantasy, it is a great movie.