That logic is an integral part of Johnny Depp's performance as J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland," the story of the playwright's friendship with the children who inspired him to write "Peter Pan." "Finding Neverland" is a flawed movie directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball") in an obvious manner that makes its "power of imagination" theme unnecessarily icky. But at its best "Finding Neverland" is a demonstration of how American and British acting have dovetailed. The actors play together so well that there is no disjunction watching Johnny Depp and Dustin Hoffman (better than he's been in a while) share scenes with Julie Christie and Kate Winslet.

What Depp brings to the role -- the grace that can make him seem the gentlest of actors (this may be the first movie Julie Christie has appeared in where she isn't the most poetic actor on-screen) -- is as important as what he leaves out: the portentousness that actors use to announce that they are playing Important Men. That is a particular pitfall of period pictures and bio films, and it always has the effect of putting the character on a pedestal -- and at a distance from the audience. Depp gives a becomingly modest performance and he pulls a lovely twist on the way fantasists are usually drawn. Instead of retreating into his own world, Depp's Barrie, who loves people, attempts to take others back there with him. It's a role that would flounder if played in the traditional Great Men of History style, and Depp brings it a lyrical directness.

But the most startling meeting of British and American styles is at the end of Richard Eyre's "Stage Beauty," his wonderfully entertaining and raunchy comedy about how actors meld with their roles. In the finale, Billy Crudup, as a drag actor making his first appearance onstage as a man, and Clare Danes, as his dresser, taking advantage of the new Restoration rules allowing women to appear onstage, act out a visceral, frightening version of Othello's murder of Desdemona. Their performance stands in marked contrast to what the movie has shown to be the Restoration's florid acting style: poses affected to elicit the audience's adoration.

The scene has been criticized for being an anachronistic intrusion of Method acting onto the Restoration stage. Those critics are right: The acting is both anachronistic and Method. They are also missing the point.

Rehearsing the scene, Crudup directs Danes not to make the emotion and the logic of the scene subservient to the verse. What's being dramatized, he reminds her, is murder born out of jealous rage. Some of the lines will be screamed, some whimpered. These might all be elementary points if the play being performed weren't Shakespeare.

Has there been any artist of comparable greatness who has had more potential audiences scared away from him by people extolling his magnificence? How many teachers have ruined Shakespeare for their students by blathering on about the majesty of his poetry before they have given them the means to understand it as dialogue?

In its own way, the scene is saying that greatness by itself isn't enough. There's a surprising amount of anger in the scene. It's as if the actors are honing the hatred in the scene they are playing to direct it at anyone and anything who would sap the vitality of this work. That the movie is directed by Richard Eyre, a veteran British stage director, means that he shares that anger. The scene's approximation of Method acting is meant to act as a bit of foreshadowing of the acting that would be necessary to throw off the stultifying air that can entomb any artifact of high culture. It's a nice and unexpected hands-across-the-water moment: an example of the immediacy that isn't exclusive to any one country.

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