Fantasy Land

Rating: 5/10 (27 February 2005)

FINDING NEVERLAND is a beautifully produced costume drama. Technically the movie is very impressive, boasting excellent acting, gorgeous cinematography, sets, costumes and a lovely music score that mimics composer Edward Elgar's more wistful compositions. The recreation of Edwardian England rivals the best Masterpiece Theater productions. But there is a huge hole in the center of this movie that prevents Finding Neverland from being anything other than a four hankie tearjerker.
The true-life story of famed novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie's friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family is given short shrift by a screenplay that insists on telling the tale as a genteel fantasy. Although the dark undercurrents of the story are there, David Magee's script (based on Alan Knee's stage play) elects to tell only part of the story and as a result much potential dramatic tension is lost.
There is nothing unusual about movies veering from the hard facts of biography. To make a an effective audience-pleaser it is often essential that real-life events be juxtaposed for effective cinematic storytelling. But in the case of Finding Neverland the actual events surrounding Barrie's life and relationship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her five sons were so inherently dramatic that changing the story even minimally seems innocuous at best.
Unsurprisingly the best scenes in Finding Neverland deal with the creation, rehearsals and opening night premiere of Barrie's classic play, PETER PAN. The mawkish sentimentalism that pervades the rest of the movie is missing in these riveting scenes that swiftly chronicle the emergence of an immortal masterpiece.
James Matthew Barrie was a complex and eccentric genius whose decades-long relationship and obsession with the Llewelyn Davies boys was by turns nurturing , exploitive and ultimately tragic. Johnnie Depp, tall and handsome, cuts a dashing figure as Barrie, an incongruity considering that the famed author was a slight individual endowed with average looks. Depp's performance, while perfectly workmanlike, displays none of the dark moods Barrie was known to have. The actor simply seems to be a conjurer of fanciful tales, a charming babysitter to Sylvia and her sons and a jilted husband to his self-absorbed, philandering actress/wife.
The real story is heartrending and unforgettable. The movie is entertaining up to a point but it should prove disappointing to anyone with even a passing familiarity to Barrie's life and the world he created for the Llewelyn Davies boys. Andrew Birkin's biography J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys gives a thorough and fascinating account of this disturbing and epochal love story.