November 18-24, 2004

movies

Pixie Pix

never say never: Johnny Depp (left) with Freddie Highmore.

Finding Neverland proves Hollywood is the boy who won't grow up.

Finding Neverland

by Sam Adams

A deliriously brilliant comic actor, Johnny Depp can be just plain dull when asked to play it straight. Chocolat, The Ninth Gate, Donnie Brasco, Nick of Time: Without flamboyant mannerisms, an odd accent, or some other eccentricity, Depp is just an average leading man, and there's nothing average about his appeal. Has any actor seemed to give so much while revealing so little of himself? A specialist in doing, not being, he's captivating as long as he's in motion, a blank spot as soon as he stops.

Depp plays J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan and the center of Marc Forster's Finding Neverland, as an ordinary man yearning to create something extraordinary: The Man Who Would Be Depp. Stuck in a passionless upper-class marriage, his playwrighting career on the wane, Barrie takes up with widow Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her four young boys, all rattled by her husband's recent death. (In real life, she had five sons, and her husband survived to see the play's premiere, but who's counting?) Promptly buckling his swash, Barrie spins yarns that raise the kiddies' spirits and his own, though dubious Peter (Freddie Highmore, soon to be Charlie Bucket to Depp's Willy Wonka) keeps one foot on the ground.

It's a safe bet that any movie that waves the word "imagination" like a mystical talisman won't exhibit any of its own, and Finding Neverland doesn't not disappoint. Sure enough, there's the widow's grinchy mother-in-law (Julie Christie) sporting a hook for a hand, and the door in Barrie's house that seems to open into a jungle wilderness. Finding Neverland ostensibly charts the real-life origins of Barrie's enduring fantasia, but its main purpose is to ratify escapism, which seems less like a defense of Barrie's work than the film's own.

Critics oozed over last year's tepid Peter Pan for reviving the age-old practice of double-casting Wendy's father and Captain Hook, as if the discovery of Freudian subtext was a triumph of the new millennium. But a glance at Herbert Brenon's 1924 silent version, with children boldly skewering pirates and Anna May Wong as a sexually forthright Tiger Lily, reveals the extent to which movies are merely regaining ground they once held uncontested. As childhood has become the stronghold of fictional, not to say fictitious, innocence, the merest glimmer of adolesence is treated as a great leap forward. But movies keep going backwards, getting more childish, like a Peter with no Wendy to pull them forward. Conceived as a bittersweet elegy for childhood, Barrie's play has become Hollywood's perennial justification of its own immaturity. It's enough to make you root for the pirates.

Finding Neverland Directed by Marc Forster A Miramax release Opens Friday at area theaters