PREMIERE November 2004 Page 22

FINDING NEVERLAND
Release Date Nov. 12 (Miramax)

Review by Glenn Kenny
4 Stars

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim titled his groundbreaking study of fairy tales The Uses of Enchantment; this film, scripted by David Magee from a play by Allan Knee and directed by Marc Forster, proposes a more challenging examination, attempting to re-create the origins of enchantment. The enchantment in question, as you might have guessed from the film’s title, is the play Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie.

The picture begins at the 1903 London premiere of Barrie’s play Little Mary. Pacing around the backstage area, convinced the play is going to flop, Johnny Depp’s Barrie is an exemplary portrait of the artist as a nervous wreck - albeit a very circumspect, that is, British, nervous wreck. As it turns out, although we’re given to believe that this bit of preshow jittering is par for the course with the playwright, Barrie is on to something here - the play is an abject flop, and Barrie’s almost improbably loyal and upbeat producer Charles Frohman (an amiable Dustin Hoffman, perhaps atoning here for his participation in the Barrie-desecrating Hook) sends Barrie home to lick his wounds. But home holds little comfort; his ravishing but obtuse wife, Mary (Radha Mitchell), is more interested in the couple’s social life than in her husband’s creative life. Sitting in the park one day, notebook in lap and massive sheepdog by his side, he is interrupted in his unproductive reveries by a quartet of little boys at play, the children of young widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet). The children open their world to him and become his de facto collaborators, and the full-hearted, independent-minded but financially put-upon Sylvia accepts both Barrie’s friendship and aid. This raises not only the hackles of Mary but those of Sylvia’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Du Maurier (Julie Christie).

But while all the foment, emotional and otherwise, that arises from Barrie’s new alliances moves the picture along at a steady clip, Finding Neverland is less about its story line than it is about how receptivity to and generosity toward one’s fellow human beings can spur the imagination. The scenes in which Barrie and the boys (Nicholas Roud, Joe Prospero, Freddie Highmore, and Luke Spill; all wonderful) pretend to be pirates or cowboys and Indians do, of course, correspond to certain motifs and images in Barrie’s Pan (and serve to remind you what a glorious, well, mess his chef d’oeuvre is), but more importantly, and more movingly, they demonstrate how play enhances life, a point underscored in a nice bit of dialogue in the film between Barrie and Frohman.

Barrie’s realization of Peter Pan here coincides with a very rude intrusion by Real Life into his new Neverland, and the picture’s conclusion wrings real tears, which are all the more earned because they’re not slapped out of you. Forster, whose last picture was the grittily despair-filled but ultimately redemptive Monster’s Ball, here proves himself as much at home in lavish period London settings as he did in the Deep South of Ball. It’s a testament to his low-key approach to period flimmaking that it didn’t even register with me until the end credits that Barrie’s most trusted friend, played by Ian Hart, went by the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Just about any other moviemaker would have surely telegraphed this point of interest, perhaps with some dialogue along the lines of, “Well, surely, Conan Doyle, as the creator of the great detective Sherlock Holmes, you must understand. . . blah, blah, blah.” Forster is content just to present the man. Finding Neverland is populated by recognizable people, as opposed to types; even the characters we’re not too fond of at first are fleshed out as fully human by the filmmakers, which helps make this movie such a powerful one. Depp and Winslet in particular are, as you might expect, immaculate. I don’t think there’s another actor alive who can convey the intermingling of gentleness and passion with as much precision as Depp. A lot of people thought it was cute that he got an Oscar nomination for cutting it up in Pirates of the Caribbean; if he doesn’t get a nomination for his work here, it’ll practically be a crime.