Complete & Utter Pap

***SPOILERS*** - nothing you couldn't discern from the first ten minutes of the film, & probably if you had any interest in seeing it you would have already, but nonetheless.

I like Johnny Depp. I like Kate Winslet. I like Julie Christie. But Finding Neverland is, in the Miramax/Johnny Depp lexicon, more in line with the sappy Chocolat than the elegiac Dead Man.

It is, in a word, dreck. Or perhaps it falls more fittingly under the category of balderdash.

The film purports to tell the story of the creation of that already dodgy theatrical icon, Peter Pan, by means of exploring the playwright J.M. Barrie's friendship with a quartet of forlorn fatherless tykes & their tubercular mother. Which is not quite exactly the circumstances under which the real-life Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn-Davies family was formed. Actually, it's absolutely nothing like it. Mrs. Llewelyn-Davies' husband was still alive when Mr. Barrie entered their lives. She didn't have tuberculosis at all, but I suppose that cancer doesn't easily lend itself to the ever-so-subtle & original cinematic foreshadowing of "Mother has a chest cold". There were five boys, not a film-friendly four. The family was not as bereft as the film would lead you to believe - Barrie first encountered the children in the care of their nanny.

I'm choking on the warm fuzzies

The machinations of the film's plot are so smoothly oiled that not only is it patently obvious that liberties have been taken, but it's clear in several places exactly what those liberties are. Even before undertaking a brief Wikipedia search. Although I'm not by any stretch staunch in my opposition to such glossings-over, when they are held in the service of one big Peep of a film, little more than toothachingly sweet fluff gilded in crunchy colored sugar, it makes my stomach hurt. This film was made to make you cry & I'll be honest - it did make me cry, in much the same way that a Campbell's soup commercial did when I was eight. The same way that The Joy-Luck Club made me cry. Useless tears, shamelessly provoked.

Radha Mitchell as Mary Barrie

As for the actors who instigated my viewing of the film; well, Kate Winslet is as impossibly lovely as always in the accolade-friendly role of the mother & Johnny Depp gives an astonishing turn as the playwright (good work on the accent, Johnny). Julie Christie doesn't have much with which to work, but then again, the enduringly beautiful Ms. Christie generally accepts acting roles only to supplement her political work (ahem, Dragonheart, anyone?), where her passions truly lie, so while mildly disappointing, it's not terribly surprising. However, it is Radha Mitchell's performance as Barrie's emotionally abandoned wife which truly stands out. She invests an otherwise thankless role with more depth than the standard surface antipathy to her husband's growing involvement with the Llewelyn-Davies. Hers is a wound stemming not from simple jealousy, not envy because her husband is sharing his "secret world" with other people, but from the fact that even as he hands it out to others, he steadfastly refuses to share it with her, which is something she desperately wants. It is clear that he has left her long before she physically leaves him. It's a treat to see such a well-rounded performance in a stock part.

Unfortunately, it's all for naught, as Finding Neverland is nothing more than another mediocre Miramax schlock-fest masquerading as "quality" "independent" "film" which nobody will remember in twenty years' time.

P.S. The filmmakers totally made up that crap about the orphans at the play's premiere. Which kind of pisses me off, because it seemed so fucking ridiculous that it had to have actually happened, & it was one of the film's few moments that I found genuinely touching. But the unveiling of the truth does get to the heart of my disdain for the film - I enjoy the myriad of complex emotions which film is capable of evoking. I do not, however, find it particularly enjoyable when a film tries to play me like a violin.