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Most of us are jaded enough moviegoers that we don’t expect biopics to be by the numbers. We watch, we go home, and we check the Internet to see just how many of the facts were played fast and loose with. We let the film be fundamentally, rather than scrupulously, accurate, and savor compensating virtues in other aspects of the proceedings. NEVERLAND is no different. At the outset we are flashed the dreaded phrase “inspired by true events” and thus feel doubly forewarned that sweeping dramatic license lies ahead.

Barrie’s acquaintance with the Llewelyn Davies family began in 1898, and the events which wrap up the film actually took place around 1909, but FINDING NEVERLAND condenses the action to 1903-05, the time frame in which "Peter Pan" was germinating and premiering. Somewhere in the journey from life to stage to screen (David Magee’s script is based on a play by Allan Knee), Sylvia’s husband is prematurely killed off. Arthur Lewelyn Davies was actually very much in the picture during the span the movie is depicting and didn’t succumb to cancer until 1907; he and Barrie became close friends once the playwright overcame the husband’s understandable mistrust. The number of sons is averaged out to four—upon Barrie’s introduction to them there were three, but Sylvia and Arthur eventually had five total. And the initial meeting in Kensington Gardens did not involve Sylvia at all, as the movie suggests, but the family nurse, Nancy Hodgson, who became the “model” for Nana in the Peter Pan story. Barrie did not did meet Sylvia herself until later on. So, spare a thought for poor Arthur and Nancy and their banishment at the hands of Hollywood streamlining, but think like a screenwriter and it’s not too hard to see why Extra Injured Party and Expendable Domestic Staff didn’t make it to the party.

In the film, the encounter in the park happens as Barrie is sitting trying to assimilate London’s tepid reception of his latest premiere. In fact, he glimpses the Llewelyn Davies clan through the hole in his newspaper where his housemaid has whisked away an offending review. Barrie’s retired-actress wife Mary (Radha Mitchell) has seemed disinclined to extend any consolation as long as her social aspirations remain on course. So the fatherless boys’ ready affection presents itself at an opportune time, and Barrie relishes in particular the chance to make a project out of Peter (Freddie Highmore), whose literal mind and bruised spirit could surely benefit from initiation into the realm of whimsy. Hours of role playing and the blossoming of Barrie’s inner child leads to his creation of literature’s most famous “perpetual child,” and even though his theatrical backer Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman) is more than a little dubious about casting an actor as a St. Bernard and wiring children for flight, the play goes on to capture the imagination of the public. All the while, James and Sylvia settle into a fulfilling platonic companionship that raises eyebrows around town and incurs protest from Mary Barrie and from Sylvia’s mother, the aristocratic Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie).

If a film needs two leads that radiate charm and decency but also bring to bear qualities that keep a tight rein on sentiment, it could scarcely do better than Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. However famous Depp is for portraying a collection of comic misfits, his mesmeric solemnity is what somehow unites all of those roles. Heart-tugging but understated gravity serves him well here playing a man for whom games were serious business. Depp’s interactions with the boys are especially nuanced. Even in the more frolicsome segments, there are no avuncular clichés, no cheap back-slapping joviality. (As a bonus, Depp’s Angus burr is softly but firmly in place, so that you don’t waste any time longing for subtitles on the one hand or counting lapses in the accent on the other.) Winslet’s range can encompass Sylvia’s forays into caprice and poignancy, too, but she always has a knack with a veddy bracing delivery and her acting choices invariably preserve dignity. There are no grand character arcs in this film, and neither James nor Sylvia has any really showy moments, but that’s why actors as consistently good as Depp and Winslet are so vital—the need is for a well-sustained glow instead of sparks.

Detractors of FINDING NEVERLAND chide it for being too tight-lipped for its own good—long on civility and short on catharsis. They feel cheated out of a degree of depth because some very adult issues—where the blame lies in the foundering of Barrie’s own marriage and whether he had impure designs on Sylvia or her boys—are given cursory treatment or skirted altogether. A critic here and there has suggested that Forster, handling a project with obvious Oscar pedigree, avoids making a complex statement in hopes that the film will glide onto the Academy’s radar on the strength of Depp’s and Winslet’s virtuosity alone. OK, so can I just say to these people, “Point taken,” and send them off to CLOSER, where I’m sure they can get plenty of scandal, betrayal, and scathing histrionics? (Or, if they really want to watch Marc Forster engage freely in psyche-pummeling, I’ll suggest they give MONSTER’S BALL another spin on the DVD player.)

I give credit to Forster for creating as multilayered a picture as he does, given the constraints he must have felt knowing that the premise would attract the younger set and that even many grownups come into an Edwardian period piece anticipating gentler content. The specters of Barrie’s dark-hued childhood, marital disillusionment, and thwarted sexuality are there, hovering in the plaintive exchanges between the major characters, for sophisticated viewers to ponder. But in the meantime, the kids have no intrusive pop psychology diverting their focus from the Llewelyn Davies boys, their education in the fanciful, and the genesis of Peter Pan.

The fact that there are no villains destined for comeuppance or epiphany also tends to make NEVERLAND suitably “adult,” in my mind. Sure, Madame du Maurier has one moment in the film where she brandishes a hooked umbrella handle and becomes the embodiment of a future digit-challenged Captain, so if some viewers need to make her into a Gorgon, they can. But mostly she’s just a woman who knits her brows over what kind of future this bizarre surrogacy offers her daughter and grandsons, and she remains wary till the end. Charles Frohman clearly expects Peter Pan to tank, but he’s no bad guy. (These roles are written as such generalized portraits of skepticism that I kept thinking any number of actors could have done them justice, but it has to be said that Christie and Hoffman offer luxurious levels of charisma). Even Mrs. Barrie is not written off as stone-cold; she gets a humanizing scene where she laments lost opportunities to be a fellow traveler on her husband’s quests for inspiration. Radha Mitchell made a stronger impression on me here than she did in PHONE BOOTH or MAN ON FIRE, meting out carefully measured wifely reproaches and presiding over the calcified stillness of the household Barrie has virtually abandoned.

The Bolger sisters were so rivetingly organic in IN AMERICA that they’ve forever set the bar way too high for other child actors, but the lads here hold their own, especially Highmore, who will take center stage when he teams with Depp again next year in the remake of CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Luke Spill as youngest son Michael fulfills the “Awww…” quotient and then some (yes, I clapped silently in my seat when Michael finally got his kite in the air!)

Forster has a deft touch with the fantasy sequences in NEVERLAND. As a backyard becomes the deck of a pirate ship or a frontier town, he moves seamlessly back and forth between imagined and actual settings as if tweaking a louvered blind that separates the two views. It’s too bad those episodes pretty much stop midway through, but the second half gives us the lavish opening night of the play and the lushly orchestrated lump-in-the-throat climax (listen for the rustle of Kleenex!). If you’re surprised to see Forster summon this kind of contrast to MONSTER’S BALL, keep in mind that the themes of the two movies are not dissimilar: two people who decide to pursue and maintain a connection to each other despite external forces that threaten to sever it. Forster returns to heavy dramatic roots in 2005 with STAY (Ryan Gosling, Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Bob Hoskins), which apparently jumps on the MEMENTO/21 GRAMS let’s-play-around-with-narrative-structure bandwagon.

FINDING NEVERLAND doesn’t quite reach a stratospheric emotional payoff, but have we really had one of those at a family film since E.T.? NEVERLAND is a quietly winning recipe of high production values, restraint in writing and acting, and celebration of the magic that happens when adults and children find common ground. In a fall season where I’ve gone to other movies and wished I could reclaim those lost hours (I do age, after all, unlike Peter), FINDING NEVERLAND left me more than satisfied.

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originally posted: 12/08/04 20:13:22
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