From the Daily Californian on line
I Do Believe in Fairies
As J.M. Barrie, Johnny Depp’s Performance Is The Real Hook
By ANNA KAUFMAN
Thursday, November 18, 2004
ILLUSTRATION/ANTHONY WU
Looking back on Johnny Depp’s long and ... let’s just say singular film career, I’ve come to the conclusion that he chooses projects based not on the quality of the movie, but rather on how much of a kick he can expect to get out of playing the part. Which explains—but does not excuse—such cinematic treasures as “The Ninth Gate,” “Sleepy Hollow,” and, more recently, “Secret Window.”
And it’s true that even when acting in pieces of tripe such as these, Depp does bring a certain manic energy to all his roles: he’s always engaging, even if the movie isn’t.
Take his Ichabod Crane, for example: an action hero/romantic lead who’s ostentatiously, unapologetically weak, never was there a character more deserving of a more interesting film in which to run—er, stumble—free.
So it’s nice when, on occasion, Depp can find a film, if not equal to his powers, then at least worthy of them. In “Finding Neverland,” you have that rare beast: a role—that of “Peter Pan” author J.M. Barrie—that you can easily understand Depp wanting to sink his teeth into, in a film that’s just as palpable for the audience as it is for him.
The official line on “Finding Neverland,” I believe, is that it’s a fictionalization of the experiences that led Barrie to create the character of Peter Pan, the boy who never wants to grow up. The movie very clearly positions Barrie himself in that role: the eternal child, forced to don grown-up clothes and move among adults.
Depp tackles the part with remarkable restraint, uttering his lines in a Scottish accent so soft-spoken it’s almost a purr, the occasional mischievous glint in his dark eyes the only sign of the lively spark just dying to come out and play.
It gets its chance when Barrie becomes acquainted with the Llewelyn Davies
family, the widowed Sylvia (Kate Winslet) and her four sons. A chance meeting in the park soon leads to Barrie ignoring his beautiful but icy wife (Radha Mitchell) in favor of playing cowboys and Indians with the Llewelyn Davies boys.
Barrie is especially intrigued by the overly-serious Peter (Freddie Highmore, who also intrigued Depp—he’ll be playing Charlie Bucket to Depp’s Willy Wonka in next year’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”). The contrast of man-child adult and wise-beyond-his-years youth makes up a great deal of the film’s emotional wallop, and while the main message here—they both have something to learn from each other!—is nothing new, it’s delicately done, and utterly believable.
Barrie’s journey as a writer is handled with equal aplomb as his journey as a man. Some of the film’s best scenes are those that show Barrie finding inspiration right before the audience’s eyes: the Llewelyn Davies boys jumping on their beds rise suddenly higher, become suspended in flight, and float out the window; the boys’ tyrannical grandmother’s jabbing finger of authority transforms into a vicious hook.
To be sure, this is an oversimplification of how the average writerly mind works, but as oversimplifications go, it’s a visually stunning one—and one for which I’m more than willing to make allowances.
Like this device, “Finding Neverland” is probably too whimsical and winsome by half; a dainty pastry puff a movie, it feels in danger of crumbling in your hand before it has a chance to melt in your mouth. But with strong performances from Depp, Winslet, and all the children—who can make or break this kind of movie—it manages to hold together.
And the aftertaste is commendable: sweet but not saccharine, rich but not heavy, “Finding Neverland” is a real delicacy, but one with kick enough to satisfy even the fastidious tongue of Johnny Depp.
Smile at a crocodile with Anna at arts@dailycal.org.
Found by Mrs. Sands
Michael Jackson Hijacked Neverland, Miramax Took it Back
Finding Neverland
Sasha Stone
The story of Peter Pan has seeped into our culture in immeasurable ways. We have whole generations of men who can be described as having Peter Pan syndrome, we have countless versions on film and in print of various types of Peters – plucky actresses to scruffy young men – everyone from Disney to Steven Spielberg has weighed in on the phenomenon. And, of course, we have the unlucky hijacking by the King of Pop who named his mansion Neverland and has aspirations of himself being Peter Pan.
Marc Forster's new film, Finding Neverland , is among the first, however, to tell the story of what inspired the original Peter Pan story. Johnny Depp stars as the author, J.M. Barrie, who begins the film as a mediocre at best playwright, an all but basically failed husband whose wife (Radha Mitchell) is as cold as ice and a man still haunted by the loneliness that imprisoned him as a youth. One day, Barrie meets a gaggle of mischievous boys, the infamous Llewellen Davies brood who immediately befriend Barrie .
Though in real life, Barrie befriended the boys while their parents were both alive and very much married, in the film Barrie meets them when Sylvia Llewellen Davies is raising her boys alone following the death of her husband. There appears to be an immediate attraction of Barrie to Sylvia and her sons, though it's certainly not sexual.
It wouldn't be hard for any male, let alone a peculiar loner like Barrie , to find Sylvia, as embodied by Kate Winslet fetching enough to spend hours upon hours of time with, and certainly among the boys Barrie can be himself but the more time he spends with them the higher the toll taken upon all of them. There's “talk” around town about why Barrie hangs out with the boys, and why he spends more time with Sylvia than with his own wife.
Yet, even still, it is as if Barrie was supposed to belong to that family somehow. Though it's tempting to go down the perverse road that Barrie was attracted to the boys – even before Michael Jackson there was speculation – but perhaps that's a single-minded view and one that certainly doesn't suit the film.
Barrie was drawn out of himself by the magic of children. Anyone who's spent enough time with adults and children knows that there is no joy, there is no soul cleansing experience like being around kids. They have a way of wiping the slate the clean, of being able to exist in a world where everything's possible and happiness is not something to search for but something that is always there, bubbling behind every new activity.
Barrie was what so many writers who came before him were: someone who uses the imagination and vibrancy of youth to inspire his work. Why wouldn't he want to spend time where he felt most inspired? Out of that inspiration, Peter Pan was born.
Finding Neverland is one of the truly magical cinematic experiences of the year. It is all things a good movie shouldn't be: manipulative, sappy, somewhat predictable, but it is affecting the way very few movies are these days.
Johnny Depp has long since proved his versatility as an actor but as Barrie he has reached a calm assuredness – his doesn't have to be a showy part, just an authentic one. In fact, Depp has never been better. But it isn't Depp nor Winslet, nor the glorious Julie Christie as Sylvia's uptight mom that steals this movie. It is a young, bright eyed actor named Freddie Highmore whose presence this film couldn't do without. His Hugh Grant-like face and tough guy pretense could melt even the hardest of hearts.
Coming off of Monster's Ball , which won Halle Berry her Oscar, Marc Forster has shown he can direct something other than the dark and depressing. The moments where his film drifts into pure illusion seem a tad heavy handed – but ultimately, the actors and the heartbreaking story make up for it.
Who knows what motivated the real Barrie to affix himself to the Llewellen Davies family and ultimately become guardian to the children – who knows what drives any writer toward inspiration. The film tells us that more than anything Barrie himself wanted to be a boy again. His character is haunted by a time in his own childhood when his older brother died and his mother took it hard – so hard that he had to dress up in his brother's clothes to get her to look at him. He was forever locked in a place of caretaker. With ailing Sylvia, he is necessary. At home with his wife he isn't.
With Finding Neverland we are reminded to look into the faces of our
young ones and listen to what they're imagining. Life, for most of them,
hasn't yet become as complicated and depressing as we all know it to be.
There is, after all, a little bit of Neverland in all of us.
From the New York Observer
Clap If You Believe in Fairies: Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland
by Andrew Sarris
Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland, from a screenplay by David Magee, based on the play The Man Who Was Peter Pan, arrives almost accidentally in New York on the 100th anniversary of the London stage spectacle of Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, by James M. Barrie (1860-1937). Barrie lived through the Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian eras and was later knighted, largely for naming and enshrining a permanent childhood complex in the annals of psychoanalysis and world literature.
The release date of Mr. Forster’s Finding Neverland was reportedly delayed because it was deemed too soon after P.J. Hogan’s 2003 live-action Peter Pan, made 50 years after Disney’s popular 1953 cartoon rendition of the play (and almost 80 years after Betty Bronson scored a fondly remembered triumph as a winsome Peter Pan in Herbert Brenon’s 1924 silent film version, a mere 20 years after the play’s 1904 premiere on the London stage). In the interim, we’ve had Mary Martin and many other boyish females flying about in theatrical venues across the world.
I must confess that, as far back as I can remember, I thought the very idea of Peter Pan a bit creepy—and this was long before Michael Jackson came along to poison the well of retrogressive whimsy. Up until now, I’ve deliberately remained so ignorant of the entire subject that I’m still not sure whether Peter Pan asks the audience to clap if they believe in fairies to save Tinkerbell or Wendy Darling.
Still, I was somewhat impressed when Alfred Hitchcock told me that one of the high points of dramatic art in the Western world was the moment when Peter Pan asked the audience to clap. It seems that Hitch had always wanted to film Barrie’s Mary Rose, with its ghostly theme, but the studios would never back him. I can only speculate that Vertigo (1958) was the next closest thing to expressing and exorcising his deepest feelings about mortality and denial.
On its own terms, Finding Neverland succeeds as a self-contained emotional experience because of its departures from biographical accuracy, and in spite of them. The documented facts would have been much messier to adapt to the screen. For example, the five real-life Llewelyn Davies boys would’ve been more unwieldy to shoot than the four depicted in the film. Likewise, including the boy’s father, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, would have been an obstacle in portraying Barrie’s casual access to the boys for playtime frolics in the park—research material for the play that would later make him a national treasure. Hence, in the film, the boys’ father is recently deceased, so that they—in particular Peter, the youngest—would still be grieving for him when Barrie appears on the scene as a strange sort of surrogate father and playmate (a role that the real-life Barrie legally assumed after their mother died).
Yet in the film, the mother also dies—much earlier than she did in real life—with Barrie as a climactic consoler. As the audience brushes away their tears, one may feel manipulated (or not), but Mr. Depp’s unyielding restraint in this and all other potentially sticky situations places him in a virtual three-way tie in my winter Oscar picks, along with Jamie Foxx (Ray) and Paul Giamatti (Sideways). Mr. Depp’s portrayal of Barrie is marvelously discreet, just subtle enough to let the well-placed fantasy sequences run rampant without undermining the central narrative. Mr. Depp’s Barrie evolves within a behavioral vacuum that encourages and inspires all the uninhibited tumult of childhood to fill it.
The film begins with the somewhat mystifying mise-en-scène of opening night at the theater, with hubbub on both sides of the curtain. We witness what is eventually a momentary setback in Barrie’s playwriting career, setting the stage, as it were, for his luminous success with Peter Pan. We’re introduced to Barrie as a shy, insecure but still decisive figure who aims to please both theater patrons and critics, and who becomes quietly distraught when his play is rebuffed by both. We’re introduced to his prophetically exasperated wife, Mary Ansell Barrie (Radha Mitchell), and to his comically stoic producer, Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman), who views the looming financial disaster of the evening with a calming sang-froid. The delicacy of these sequences provides early assurances of a light touch in Mr. Forster’s directorial approach.
The separate bedrooms in the Barrie household evoke not only a loveless marriage, but also an upper-class existence with the full complement of servants. Not that Barrie’s subsequent forays in the park with the Llewelyn Davies brood mark him as a predator of the less advantaged. Indeed, when Barrie is introduced to the beautiful mother of the boys, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet), and their beautiful but formidably disapproving grandmother, Mrs. Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie), the widow of the celebrated illustrator and novelist George du Maurier, it’s Barrie’s social-climbing wife who insists that he invite the whole family to dinner. The French-born du Maurier, the creator of such eccentric creatures as Trilby and Svengali in his second novel, Trilby (perhaps best known these days as the inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera), is not the only cultural name dropped in the course of the film. Ian Hart plays a friendly gossip who warns Barrie about his "unseemly" association with four boys and their comely widowed mother, a woman not his wife. Not until the closing credits do we discover him to be Arthur Conan Doyle.
So the dinner is held, and ruined in Mary Barrie’s eyes when her husband persists in playing the clown for the boys’ amusement. Mr. Depp thus expresses through Barrie a quiet fanaticism at work, a stubborn belief in the spiritual supremacy of childhood in human existence. Barrie’s own spiritual desolation is traced back to the death of his older brother, a loss that left his mother too inconsolable to pay attention to her younger son. In desperation, Barrie dressed up in his brother’s clothes, and was rewarded with the first intent glances of his mother toward him.
One might say that the wounded boy, James Barrie, never really grew up—and thus, in literary terms, the deep appeal for him of boys who refused to grow up. Yet this would constitute a grotesque oversimplification. It is not simply growing up that’s at issue here, but rather facing the fearsome issues of life and death at an early age. Barrie lived at a time when childhood deaths were more common than they are today. The crocodile with the clock ticking in his belly chews us all, as one of Barrie’s elderly theatergoing admirers tells the pensive author. Barrie responds with a wondrously startled expression at the old lady’s good-natured perspicacity, even after that same crocodile has swallowed her own husband.
The integration of childhood and adulthood has never been more felicitously achieved than it has here, with the perfect casting of Mr. Depp, Ms. Winslet, Ms. Christie, Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Hoffman on the grown-up side, in tandem with the Llewelyn Davies brothers: Jack (Joe Prospero), George (Nick Roud), Michael (Luke Spill) and the heartbreaking youngest, Peter (Freddie Highmore). It’s sobering to note that in real life, two of the Davies boys died as young adults, and that Peter himself—who never came to terms with the unwanted celebrity he received as the model for Peter Pan—threw himself under a train at the age of 63. Perhaps to cheat the crocodile of time?
Still, I’m sure that if Hitchcock were alive today, he’d lead the clapping
when asked if he believed in fairies by that convincingly eloquent Scottish
actress, Kelly MacDonald, as the most evocative Peter Pan for the ages.
As a work of art, Finding Neverland establishes its limits and then transcends
them to provide a glorious entertainment for this holiday season.
From TownOnline.com
Finding Neverland
Grade: A-
( PG )
Peter Pan principal
Review by David Brudnoy
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Charles Dodgson, known as Lewis Carroll, who took Alice into Wonderland and has enchanted the world for a century and a half, loved little girls but from all accounts never acted inappropriately with them. Likewise, James M. Barrie loved the company of little boys, but from all accounts was never out of line with them. He wrote much, in later life became a baronet and eventually rector of Edinburgh University, but he lives for us as the creator, one century ago, of "Peter Pan," which was staged to great acclaim in London and has been theatrically produced ever since, somewhere, much filmed, most recently starring Jeremy Sumpter, who headlines the CBS program "Clubhouse."
This new film, starring the inexhaustibly multi-talented Johnny Depp, manages at once to create the hint of a romance that never flourished, with the widowed mother of a quartet of young boys, a smidgen of danger, in the forbidding character of her mother, Mrs. DuMaurier (Julie Christie), and an invitation into the world of imagination that is in many ways as lovely as is the play itself.
Set in the year Barrie created the play, 1904, this family-friendly film (for those who fret about these things, one would have to be lunatic to find anything in its imagery or vocabulary unseemly) tells of the accidental meeting of Barrie with Sylvia Davies (a ravishing but fretful Kate Winslet) and her sons, all at first dubious about this polite, kind stranger's desire to entertain them with imaginary characters. One, Peter (Freddie Highmore), is especially glum, the hardest to bring around, but eventually the focus of Barrie's attention.
The author and playwright's wife (Radha Mitchell) is supportive of his exertions, of course - he has had many success in print and on stage - but not entirely certain that his attention to the Davies family is appropriate. How much actual confrontation Barrie had with the overly protective Mrs. DuMaurier, who felt that this (to her mind) silly man with his fantasies was corrupting the serious futures of her grandsons, we don't know. Nor do we know for certain that nothing transpired between him and their mother. What we do know is that Depp easily manages the appropriate upper stratum (but not elevatedly pompous) accent and, if we didn't know him from his long career of varied roles, could easily take him for a Brit. His is a remarkable performance, for its combination of reserve and a boldness of joyful gayety and tender ministrations to the clearly emotionally wounded boys, who live in a nice home but not in one blessed by a safe and sure income. I don't know if in reality Barrie became fully a father figure to these lads, but here the actor demonstrates a keen understanding that even a surrogate can move children to a confidence they've lacked.
The other boys (Joe Prospero, Nick Roud and Luke Spill) all finely fill
their roles, along with Highmore, never descending to mugging or aspiring
to high dramatic intensity. Dustin Hoffman, in an avuncular role as the
owner of the Duke of York's Theatre, who has seen Barrie's career at higher
points of popularity and is doubtful about the prospects for his new venture,
manages to resist what in some roles (as in "I
Huckabees") he can become: insufferable. Not only is the premiere presentation
of "Peter Pan" a splendid venture in papering the house, with children
(evidently not a true episode), but a scene at the Davies home that turns,
fantastically, into a magical garden of the fantasies of a child's willing
suspension of disbelief emerges as a masterpiece of merging what till that
point has been a film devoid of special effects, with a memorable few minutes
of near-psychedelic effects and avid involvement of the children and some
adults.
For whatever reason, I suffer from (or at least should acknowledge)
a weak spot for stories about orphans, like the recent film of "Peter Pan"
(with a real boy lead), so scenes here brought out the old softie in me.
That's fair warning in case you are less susceptible to this sort of gentle
cinema. Predictions are always dicey but I offer these: Oscar nominations
for Depp and the film, perhaps others. Even in our age, which prides itself
(or, better put, we pride ourselves) on ironic knowingness, we sometimes
still can take unalloyed pleasure from a film with nothing intended for
us but the sheer joy of our minds unfettered by morose reality, instead
unleashed to revel in a venture that warms and bring smiles to audiences.
From the Star Online
Marc Forster's long day's journey into `Neverland'
By Terry Lawson
Sometime before Marc Forster got involved with Monster's Ball and directed Halle Berry to an Oscar, he came across a script about English playwright J.M. Barrie and his relationship with a young widow and her four children that inspired Barrie to write Peter Pan.
"As a great admirer of `Peter Pan,' I was very interested," says Forster. "And I had never heard this story about Barrie. So I went to Harvey (Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax) to talk to him about it, and he said, `No kid, this is not for you.'"
After the success of Monster's Ball, however, Weinstein was eager to talk to Forster about projects they might team up on, and he remembered the director's interest in the script. "He said, `Hey, you remember that `Peter Pan' movie? That script is still alive. What do you think?'"
Forster thought maybe, then yes, and now Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as the ill widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, is, along with Leonard DiCaprio's upcoming The Aviator, one of Weinstein's final opportunities to put a few final Academy Awards on a resume he'll soon be shopping. Weinstein is widely expected to be pushed out of the company he founded with his brother Bob when their management contracts with parent company Disney expire next year.
"It would be a nice going-away present," says Forster, who still speaks with a slight accent of his homeland, Switzerland. "And I would really be happy if Johnny was nominated because he really deserves to be recognised."
Having made two small, contemporary dramas (2001's Monster's Ball and his first feature, the admired but little seen Everything Put Together, winner of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize), Forster, 35, was eager to work on what filmmakers inevitably call a "larger canvas."
But for all his enthusiasm for Finding Neverland, he had reservations. For one, he was afraid the script, which focuses on the married Barrie's fatherly relationship with Davies' oldest, angry son, George, and his growing affection for a widow who attempts to hide her affliction with a debilitating disease, was too sentimental.
"The script has a naivete that I loved, and it was very tender, and I didn't want to upset that. But neither did I want to make a cough-and-cry tragedy, you know, where the heroine gets paler and paler until she expires. Plus, I eventually realized that both my previous movies centered on death, and I began to think, `Umm, maybe I have a preoccupation here I need to deal with.'"
With some rewriting, Forster was able to alleviate his concerns about sentimentality, especially with Depp committed to play Barrie. But as with nearly every drama in which a child plays a critical role, there was the usual anxiety on the part of the director and the stars in the casting of Peter Davies, the troubled boy who served as the model for the one who refused to grow up.
After looking at a number of professionals and amateurs, Forster settled on then-10-year-old Freddie Highmore, who has appeared in several films and TV shows since getting his start in an English movie called Women Talking Dirty in 1999, making him almost a seasoned veteran. But he had never had a part as large or as pivotal as this one, and everyone was nervous until he had his first scene with Depp.
"I remember I called `cut' and we all just stood there for a few seconds because Freddie was so great. Johnny walked over to me and said, `Well, you know this changes everything, don't you?' And from that point on, we all breathed easier. I knew a real, true relationship had formed between Johnny and Freddie when Johnny showed up on the set to do line readings in scenes in which we would usually use a double, or just have the actor doing his part of the dialogue on his own."
Soon after, says Forster, Depp called director Tim Burton - who is directing Depp in a remake of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory - and told him he had found their Charlie. "So obviously he loved him," says Forster. "But he got on with all the kids.
"Between scenes, you could always find him with the kids, wearing an Indian headdress or one of the costumes from the fantasy sequences. It was wonderful, because the point of the film is how Barrie was able to see the world through a child's eyes, the way he dealt with the kids made you understand Johnny did, too."
When Forster finished his first cut of Finding Neverland, he showed it to Weinstein, who has long been known as Harvey Scissorhands for his post-production involvement, ordering cuts and re-shoots. But following a successful test screening, Weinstein told him that he liked the film just as it was, that he thought it was ready to go. At the time, Weinstein was locking horns with Martin Scorsese over the final cut of Gangs of New York, and Forster believes "his attention was probably elsewhere - but I wasn't complaining."
The director was so energised when shooting wrapped that he immediately went to work on his very different follow-up, Stay, a psychological thriller starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling, only to learn that Finding Neverland would not be released last December, as originally planned, because a new live-action version of Peter Pan was being released and that the Barrie estate feared the public would be confused.
By then, Depp had made a major splash with The Pirates of the Caribbean, and Weinstein had become convinced that he and Finding Neverland had Oscar prospects. So he decided to delay the film's release for a year.
"It was probably the right decision," Forster admits, "but it's been like being pregnant for two years. I'm just glad it's almost over."
Meanwhile, with Stay set for release early next year, he has already finishing preproduction on his next film, Stranger Than Fiction, a brainy comedy that stars Will Ferrell as an IRS auditor who begins to hear his life being narrated inside his head. The early buzz about the script, by hot young writer Zach Helm, is that it could do for Ferrell what The Truman Show did for Jim Carrey.
"I was excited when I read it because it was this really original comedy,
very smart but very funny," says Forster. "I thought it would be a real
change of pace for me as well as Will. But then I read on, and it turns
out to be partly about death. I consider myself a happy guy, not morbid
at all, but it's like, uh, here we go again."
