Finding Neverland is a nice film about a nice little man who befriends a nice young widow and her nice family, and uses their relationship as the basis for a nice play that ends up succeeding, well, nicely. In fact, Finding Neverland is such a thoroughly nice film, saying anything not nice about it would only make me seem like one of those curmudgeonly critics who hates everything.
The nice little man in question is James Matthew Barrie, and the play he wrote is Peter Pan. The film is set in London in 1904, just as Barrie (Johnny Depp, ripping off the mild Scottish accent Robin Williams used in Mrs. Doubtfire) begins his famous relationship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her children (played by a gaggle of Brit brats with charmingly cute accents). Barrie is just coming off a poorly received play, to the displeasure of his producer (Dustin Hoffman, on hand mainly because he played the title role in Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan-inspired Hook).
Normally the disgruntled producer would be one of the bad guys, but Hoffman never registers more than mild displeasure, and he obviously comes around when the notices for Peter Pan come rolling in. Come to think of it, the only characters remotely resembling villains in the film are Sylvia’s controlling mother (Julie Christie), and a few clucking spinsters who dip their crumpets in tea while speculating about the true nature of Barrie’s affinity for Sylvia—or worse yet, for the kids.
But if Barrie was the Michael Jackson of his generation, the film never allows even the barest whiff of scandal (or, for that matter, some of the more inconvenient historical details) to ruin the whimsical mood. And this whimsy is where Finding Neverland finds the heart that keeps its niceness from becoming dullness. Director Marc Forster (whose last film was 2001’s Monster’s Ball) uses the magic of cinematography to show us the fantastic things that are seemingly always going on in Barrie’s head. Although many of these scenes are directly linked to Barrie’s growing inspiration for his new play, it’s the less obvious ones that stand out. (In one of the more memorable of these unobtrusive little moments, Barrie and his increasingly frustrated wife head off to separate rooms. Her door opens on an empty bedroom; his opens on a bright blue sky.)
The real J. M. Barrie’s own words, taken directly from Peter Pan and used in several scenes showing the play in progress, finish the job of drawing us into Barrie’s wondrous world. By the end of the film, the point is clear: Peter Pan may have been named after Peter Llewelyn Davies, but the real boy who never grew up was Barrie himself.
(3/4)