Finding Neverland

Finding Neverland (2004) is about how Peter Pan came to be written. J. M. Barrie is a playwright in London whose plays are not working. In a park he meets a widow and her four sons. He starts playing with them: pirates, Indians, a boy who flies. Those games become the material of a play. What the film does best is the play itself. When Barrie turns a blanket in a garden into a tent, the camera shows the transformation; the audience sees what the children see. One of the boys, Peter, resists it most. His father has died and he does not regard imagining as an escape. His relationship with Barrie is the real subject. The distance from the record matters. In the film the mother is a widow; in fact her husband was alive while the play was being written and died later. Barrie appears almost solitary; in fact he was married. There were four boys, but the film compresses them and the timeline considerably. Johnny Depp worked on the Scottish accent and stays away from his usual heightened manner. Kate Winslet plays the mother and Julie Christie the grandmother. Freddie Highmore was twelve; Depp recommended him for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after this. Jan Kaczmarek's score won an Oscar. The performance in the final act is the peak of the film. It runs 106 minutes. Good for: biographical drama, literature, and family stories. Less good for: illness and grief weigh heavily, and the film noticeably softens the record.