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PREMIERE
February, 2005
Page 53
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PETER PAN SYNDROME
He flys. She coughs. So what? Can someone please buy this movie a one-way ticket to Neverland?
Story by Libby Gelman-Waxner
From the "If You Ask Me" Column
Illustration by Robert De Michiell
Have you ever wondered how going to a movie with your very best friend can somehow turn that beloved person into a complete raving idiot? I went to see Finding Neverland with my best buddy, Stacy Schiff, and it almost ended our relationship. Johnny Depp stars as J.M. Barrie, the Scottish playwright, and the story shows how his bond with a lovely young widow and her four adorable sons inspired him to write Peter Pan. Johnny is so porcelain pale, with such sucked-in cheekbones, such exquisitely floppy Brideshead hair, and such spotlessly draped tailoring that I expected one of the boys to ask, “Mummy, who is that beautiful lady?” Stacy protested, “Libby, you don’t understand anything! Johnny is a romantic dream, and his kinship with Kate Winslet as the widow was a melding of two souls, and not every leading male character has to have a penis!”
Even though Kate is supposed to be penniless, she still lives in a gorgeous London home decorated in a pastel Disney-Edwardian style, and Johnny seems to have a pristine jewel-box theater at his disposal year-round: It’s as if the entire movie is taking place in a little girl’s bedroom or an airport gift shop. The little boys constantly wear white and never get grimy, and their most rambunctious behaviour involves politely jumping up and down on their beds, which Johnny fantasizes as cloud-borne flight. The whole movie could be entered into evidence for the defence at Michael Jackson’s trial: “You see!” Michael could tell the judge. “I only took those boys flying!”
“You are so disgusting,” Stacy informed me. “Johnny is a father figure to those boys, and he teaches them to use their imaginations – he’s like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, only less butch.” The tykes also speak as if they’ve learned English from watching Masterpiece Theatre, and they sit perfectly still while watching the play. “You’re just bitter because your kids played video games in their laps all during The Lion King,” Stacy explained. “And maybe they’d be better behaved if they had nice shiny bangs, like Kate’s children.”
Johnny has a troubled marriage to a socially ambitious former actress, although the pair never raise their voices and seem to meet only for tea: In fact, no matter how many traumatic events occur, everyone in the movie speaks in hushed, measured tones. “That’s because they’re English,” Stacy insisted. “It’s a very small country, so no one has to shout. It’s so refreshing to see a couple express their need for a divorce by gently dabbing at the corners of their mouths with starched linen napkins, instead of calling each other skanks on Springer. At one point, Johnny is seen in an immaculate all-white cricket uniform, which makes him resemble an angel in a toilet paper commercial. An onlooker suggests that Johnny’s involvement with Kate and her lads is a trifle odd, and Johnny becomes so outraged that he almost moves his lips.
“People can be so cruel and thoughtless,” Stacy sympathised. “But didn’t you love it when Johnny fantasized about waltzing with a trained bear in the park?” I would have answered, but I was too busy picturing Johnny dancing with a real bear, and the CSI investigation that would focus on what was left of Johnny’s neck. Johnny also installs a platoon of the cleanest little orphans I’ve ever seen among the opening night audience at Peter Pan, to promote a sense of childlike wonder in the adult theatergoers: If audience members got bored, an orphan could remind them, “My parents are dead.” This is the kind of movie where, at any second, there might be a smiling gent in a bowler hat riding by on one of those bicycles with a huge front wheel.
Finally, Kate starts coughing, and though the disease is never named, she’s clearly suffering from whatever killed Ali MacGraw in Love Story. It’s a fatal illness whose major symptom seems to be one perfect honey-blond ringlet out of place. I’m now going to describe Kate’s death scene, so if you have a sensitive stomach, or a shred of common sense, please stop reading. As Kate perishes, Johnny gently guides her into Neverland, which is a fantasy garden filled with wafting butterflies, gurgling fountains and glitter. Kate now wears a diaphanous gown and she’s led away by winged fairies. In Finding Neverland, death is a ride on My Little Pony, or maybe a vacation in Barbie’s Dream Mortuary, with a euology by Strawberry Shortcake. “You don’t know,” Stacy declared. “Maybe that’s what death is really like. Maybe it’s like joining Cirque du Soleil.” “Or maybe.” I suggested, “Kate was just going to hell.”
Stacy and I were barely speaking, and then we made the mistake of going to see Team America, the latest gross-out satire from the South Park guys. It’s all about an elite squad of brave heroes who patrol the planet, blowing up terrorists, and everyone in the movie is a puppet. I thought it was hilarious, especially when one of the puppets couldn’t stop vomitting, and when a puppet couple had the most extremely graphic sex that puppets without genitals could have. “This movie is repulsive!” Stacy screamed. “Puppets should be sacred! Jim Henson would never have let Kermit take Miss Piggy from behind!” The movie also includes puppets of various liberal celebrities getting mutilated, which cracked me up. “But that’s revolting!” Stacy moaned. “Poor Helen Hunt! Don’t they think she has feelings?” “Of course,” I replied. “That’s why her puppet bleeds.”
Finally, in a last-ditch attempt at salvaging our friendship, we went to see Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education. Luckily, this movie is so fantastic it brought Stacy and me back together. “I know that this movie is about pedophile priests, blackmail, murder and heroin-addicted transsexuals,” Stacy admitted, “but it’s so sexy.” I agreed completely: In Pedro’s Neverland, the fairies wear Speedo’s and bad wigs, and it’s all sinfully delightful. Pedro is brilliant that he healed us, without using unicorns or lustful marionettes. When I die, I’m going to Pedroland if you ask me.
JOHNNY DEPP
Finding Neverland
Age: 41 Birthplace: Owensboro, Kentucky Essential Filmography: Edward Scissorhands (1990), Ed Wood (1994), Dead Man (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Blow (2001), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
With his Keith Richards-inspired turn as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp proved he could do quirky and commercial, scoring his first Oscar nomination after years of being ignored by the Academy. In Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland, Depp once again demonstrates his exceptional ear for accents, playing Peter Pan’s Scottish-born creator J.M. Barrie, opposite Kate Winslet and a gaggle of children. “I didn’t have a dialect coach on set but I did work with someone,” Depp says of his flawless brogue. “I [figured] if I hadn’t got it by the time I was shooting, then I was in deep doo-doo.”
Together he and Forster worked hard on not burying the story’s emotional core in syrupy sentimentality. “I loved the fact that [Forster] had as much or more of an allergy to synthetic emotion saccharine as I did,” Depp says. “You could have easily teetered onto the wrong side of the sugar factory, and he was very attentive to that.” The result is a performance that’s extraordinary for it’s subtlety and unfussy, unassuming purity -- it is Depp’s most understated to date. “Barrie was kind of a wreck with most adults. But with kids he found himself; he kind of blossomed, so that’s sort of where I wanted to go,” Depp muses. “I saw the guy as a kind of innocent, but an innocent with a very dark past.”
-Mark Salisbury
Thanks to Becca for the photos and transcript!
