An appalling travesty of a film; built on misleading lies

Rating: 1/10 (14 July 2010)

I think that "Finding Neverland" is one of the worst films I have seen in the last couple of years and certainly the worst I have seen with actors of the caliber of Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
For anyone who knows even the barest outline of the life of J.M. Barrie, or has bothered to even READ "Peter Pan" (the play, or any of the novels...and I do NOT mean the Disney cartoon version) knows everything in this film is predicated on falsehoods. "Peter Pan" is a dark psychological study in the form of a children's story...it's also a painfully honest look by Barrie at his innermost demons, especially his refusal to grow up and become a man. "Peter Pan" doesn't CELEBRATE the idea of refusing to grow up, so much as show it as the hollow refusal to mature and accept change.
As other commenter's have mentioned, it is widely believed that J.M. Barrie was a pedophile, with a seriously twisted interest in only young boys. He was obsessed for many years with the Llewelyn boys, and this was mostly over the objections of BOTH THEIR PARENTS, who were very much alive and married at the time Barrie met the children and wrote the play. Their correspondence survives and it clearly shows their discomfort with the intrusions of this adult man into their personal lives. Unfortunately, both parents met with untimely deaths due to cancer (not TB, as indicated in the death of Winslet's character), and the wealthy and influential Barrie was able to take custody of the boys.
There are those who do not accept the pedophilia of J.M. Barrie, because there is no smoking gun -- he was never caught with his pants down, molesting a child in the park -- but he clearly had an obsessive and abnormal interest in young boys.For example, he wrote thousands of love letters to one of the Llewelyn children, which the parents destroyed) On top of this, Barrie is believed to have been impotent, which eventually drove his wife away. There is not the slightest evidence that the real life Barrie had an affair or any interest at all in the adult Mrs. Llewelyn -- this is the worst and most misleading part of the film, designed to take the emphasis off of the unnaturalness of his interest in someone else's children. (No one in the film or real life bothered to question why Barrie, married for years to a beautiful and devoted wife, never had children of his own or even adopted any.) It is worth noting that the Llewelyn boys grew up to tragic lives -- two died in WWI, two of them committed suicide, and the one survivor considered the play "Peter Pan" to have been a blight on their lives.
Many people watching this have only the memories of the Disney cartoon and the famous Mary Martin musical version from the 50s (often shown on TV) to base their memories of the actual play "Peter Pan". These are charming adaptations, but in many ways untrue to the real play and novels (the earliest of which is called "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" and is a must read for anyone interested in Barrie or Peter Pan.) Like most great children's literature -- think of Grimm's fairy tales -- "Peter Pan" is actually a very dark and sometimes scary story. Peter himself is a conflicted and troubled character, not a little harbinger of joy.
Besides it's absolute dishonesty, and storyline changes that are not for clarity, but instead utterly obscure the true (and rather unpleasant) real life story, this is a terribly dull movie simply to watch. We only get to see bits and pieces of Barrie's theater work (he did actually write many other plays besides "Peter Pan"; some, like "The Admirable Crichton" are quite good, he was not the hack he is portrayed here). The lovely and talented Kate Winslet is wasted in a soggy Victorian role that really should be done away with -- the beautiful girl dying of "mystery movie disease" (i.e., cough cough, she is dead). The normally very gifted Johnny Depp struggles here with the obviously dull character (his real life conflicts utterly stripped away) and he can't quite handle the Scots accent, which is awkward. I hate to criticize young child actors as their performances are often more a reflection of how they are directed, but little Freddie Highmore is terribly overpraised here for a very maudlin, weepy performance. He's one of these too cute, too precocious youngsters who seem utterly unlike complicated, prickly real life children.
It's a shame in the present day that we are apparently unable to handle an authentic look at J.M. Barrie, such as the excellent biopic "Kinsey" -- a film that was able to tackle a complex individual with all of his brilliance represented alongside all his flaws and failures. Instead, in "Finding Neverland", we are force fed a lot of sticky treacle about day dreams, never accepting adulthood and "just believing" in fairyland....perhaps in the end an accurate reflection of a society that can't accept the reality that a person can be a talented genius AND a pedophile at the same time.