"Finding Neverland"

Johnny Depp soars high as "Peter Pan" playwright J.M. Barrie, but this movie doesn't ever quite take off.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 12, 2004 | Because no one knows where genius, or even just plain old inspiration, comes from, it's a favorite game of writers, filmmakers and playwrights to try to guess. In "Finding Neverland," director Marc Forster -- working from a script by David McGee, adapted from a play by Allan Knee -- attempts to trace, in a manner more suggestive than factual, the roots of Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." From what thin air did Barrie, who'd already written a number of successful plays, pull his ideas? And how does an ordinary mortal take a menacing pirate with a hook for a hand, a crocodile with a ticking tummy, and a flying boy who refuses to grow up and make any sense of it at all?

No one has the answers to those questions, and the director and writers of "Finding Neverland" don't pretend to, even though the picture is, as we're tepidly alerted at the beginning, "based on true events." What Forster is interested in here is less a biopic than a mapped lunar landscape of one writer's imagination. Forster has some good ideas here: A few of the fantasy sequences in "Finding Neverland" are lovely, and he stages a few brief scenes from "Peter Pan" in a way that gives us a sense of the impact the play must have had on straitlaced, bejeweled Edwardian audiences. But if "Finding Neverland" shows a bit more grace and surefootedness than Forster's last picture, "Monster's Ball," it just doesn't have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.

It does, however, have Johnny Depp, as James Matthew Barrie. The movie opens in London in 1903, just as Barrie is coming off a less-than-successful play. His producer (played with amusingly distracted efficiency by Dustin Hoffman) isn't particularly troubled by the play's failure, but he is, of course, hoping the next one will be a hit. The problem is that Barrie doesn't yet have an idea for the next one. It's also clear that he and his coolly beautiful wife, Mary (Radha Mitchell), have a relationship that's affectionately businesslike and not much more.

One day while Barrie is having his outing in the park -- he goes there with his bear of a dog, Porthos, and spends the morning jotting down ideas for his plays while taking in, perhaps a bit wistfully, the life of the world around him -- he meets a family of four boys, ranging in age from about 5 to 12, and their widowed mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet). He and Porthos entertain the boys with an impromptu circus show (it really amounts to little more than Porthos' ability to prop himself on his hind legs for a few minutes, but Barrie sets off the routine with a heck of a windup, which makes all the difference). And aside from the fact that Barrie is taken with their mother (she is, after all, the lustrous, wholly alive Kate Winslet -- how could he resist her?), he enjoys the children so much that he arranges to meet them again the next day.

Next Page: Depp is the perfect embodiment of a boyish man who steadfastly remains young at heart

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