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Finding Neverland
Johnny Depp doesn't always play gentlemen, but even when he takes on the role of a slurry sea rascal (Pirates of the Caribbean), an opium-hooked Holmesian detective (From Hell), or — still his greatest character — the worst filmmaker of all time (Ed Wood), he inevitably comes off as a gentle man. It's the essence of his on-screen nature. He's the rare actor whose exquisitely chiseled, ''perfect'' features communicate not just romantic and erotic charisma but a kind of spiritual ideal. Call it grace. In Finding Neverland, Depp, as the Scottish-born turn-of-the-century playwright J.M. Barrie, portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.
It's 1903, and Barrie, a celebrated figure within the London cultural world, has slid into a bit of a valley. His latest play, Little Mary, is a bomb, and his marriage appears to have hit an even deader spot than his career. In his cozy town house, seated at dinner in a crisp tuxedo, he exchanges icy pleasantries with his wife (Radha Mitchell), a beautiful yet terribly proper Victorian killjoy who is anxious to expand her husband's social connections but shows no interest in stoking his creative fire. But then Barrie, strolling through the casual green grandeur of Kensington Gardens, meets the newly widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her eager, restive brood of four boys. To entertain them, he pretends that his Saint Bernard is a circus bear, and he dances a merry waltz with the animal right in the middle of the park.
It's a lovely scene — silly in the best sense, which is to say that in Edwardian London, the willingness to appear ridiculous in public is really a rebellion against civility. It's Johnny Depp committing what no other actor can perform quite as well: a gentle blasphemy. Sylvia, played by Winslet with a winsome melancholy, has no income to speak of and must therefore kowtow to the wishes of her mother, Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie), a puritan scold who serves the same wet-blanket function within the Llewelyn Davies home that Barrie's wife does in his. Taking refuge in each other, Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies clan envelop themselves in a conspiratorial bond of play, imagination, and innocent romance. The boys enjoy a surrogate father who teaches them to fly kites and make up stage plays. Barrie, meanwhile, finds the warmth he has been missing at home, as he and Sylvia cultivate a quiet platonic love. This surrogate family of latter-day childhood moves him to write the play he calls Peter Pan.
Finding Neverland is a caressingly sweet literary fairy tale ''inspired by true events'' (though there's evidence that Barrie and Sylvia were not, in fact, platonic). The director, Marc Forster (Monster's Ball), working from a script by David Magee, has crafted a placid domestic variation on Shakespeare in Love, with Barrie drawing his inspiration, and much of the detail, for his revolutionary play out of a relationship that has infused him with life. There are additional echoes of Dreamchild, the splendid 1985 Dennis Potter fantasia that dramatized the forbidden underpinnings of Lewis Carroll's invention of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. If Finding Neverland is a lesser movie than either of those two, that's because its portrayal of Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family is more touching and fully felt than anything about his actual creation of Peter Pan.
Barrie, we learn, had already invented Neverland: It's the paradisiacal lost world he wrote about in his diary as a boy, when his brother's death forced him to grow up before he expected, or wanted, to. Finding Neverland flirts with childhood as a kingdom of haunted purity, yet as Barrie conceives and stages Peter Pan, the film grows literal-minded and a touch scattershot. He sees the four Llewelyn Davies boys jump up and down on their beds in a pillow fight and imagines them floating out the window — a beautiful notion that, for some reason, becomes almost a trivial afterthought when the young actors begin to fly around on their wires on stage. When Barrie envisions Sylvia's mother with a hook instead of a hand, we giggle knowingly — but that's virtually the only nod to the vengeful captain. The movie depends so much upon our foreknowledge of Peter Pan that it never discovers the story's magic anew. Finding Neverland is studded with little pleasures, like Dustin Hoffman's marvelously crusty turn as Barrie's cynical theater backer (I guess that counts as a Hook reference), and there's an irresistible three-hankie moment near the end when Barrie's stage actors perform the play at home for the ailing Sylvia. The movie glows, all right. It just never soars.
