Finding Neverland

I had resisted seeing Finding Neverland because I really disliked the previous film from director Mark Forster, Monster's Ball. That film had been universally praised by critics (including Ebert, who called it the best film of 2002) and won Halle Berry an Oscar, while I found it to be an ineffective, over-the-top tearjerker. However, my friend Cory won the day, and convinced me to check out a late show this evening at the Century City Mall.



And, man, let me tell you, it is really hard being right all the time. I'll say this: Finding Neverland will not go down as the Most Annoying Movie of 2004, that prize remaining reserved for Zach Braff's cinema de poseur, Garden State. But it's bad...really bad. Ridiculously, shamefully, embarrassingly bad. If you can't tell this movie is bad, there's a good chance you have poor taste in movies overall.

Why is it so bad? Well, allow me to begin at the beginning. The film follows playwrite J.M. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) over the course of several months of 1903, as he is writing his most famous play, "Peter Pan." According to the film (which claims in the opening credits to be "based on true events," though the veracity of most of the situations would be difficult to verify), Barrie based his creation on the Davies family, a widow (an underused Kate Winslet), her four boys and her overbearing, shrewish mother (Julie Christie), whom he met one day in the park. His relationship with this surrogate family winds up taking a toll on his own marriage (to the movie's back-up shrew, played by Radha Mitchell in the film's only realistic performance), as well as causing a minor scandal within London high society.

But, of course, Barrie doesn't care about being political, or impressing high-falutin' society types. He's a free spirit, you see, in the grand tradition of most characters Johnny Depp has played during his long career. Depp was obviously cast to give Barrie a childlike aura, the same zany, unhinged spirit he brought to projects like Ed Wood, Bennie and Joon, Ed Wood and Pirates of the Carribean, and will no doubt bring to next year's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But there is a problem: the spectre of all these other movies. There's an unshakable feeling that we've seen Johnny Depp do this bit before, whether it's dancing around with his oversized dog or amusing the children with funny faces while the stiff, boring adults converse at the dinner table.

And, to be honest, I'm never really that impressed by movies about free spirits who inspire us with their gee-whiz, wide-eyed, optimistic approach to life. I'm sure there have been winning movies about dreamers (and that's part of the promise of The Aviator, I suppose, though I still haven't seen the film), but this movie definitely falls into the trap of presenting a thoroughly unbelievable protagonist, and then asking us to not only accept but embrace his delirious, often nonsensical take on the world.

Depp's Barrie seems completely incapable of anticipating the emotions of others, and I don't think this was thematically intended by Forster or screenwriter David Magee (as for the intentions of author Allan Knee, who wrote the play upon which the script was based, I can only guess).

Rather than see him as an innocent with enviable imagination and wonderment, I came to view Barrie as something of a monster, fun enough to spend time with, but utterly shut off from the realities of day-to-day living. He befriends four fatherless children without considering what effect this will have on their lives. He ignores and soon deserts his wife to, by his own admission, spend "every moment [he] can" with his new, young friends. While minding the children, he becomes distracted at a crucial moment, allowing an accident to endanger one of them.

Perhaps most befuddling, Barrie remains strangely asexual throughout the film. Quite obviously, the work "Peter Pan" carries with it the odd subtext of adolescent sexuality. And Finding Neverland at its heart deals with the close friendship between a grown man and four pre-pubescent boys. So, Forster can't exactly sidestep the issue completely. There is one throwaway scene in which a friend (Ian Hart) queries Barrie about his relationship to the Davies family, and intimates that people have suggested he may be molesting the boys, but Barrie brushes off this suggestion as nonsense, and the film never brings up the issue again.

I mention this not because I think Barrie was definitely a pederast, or because the film portrays him as such, but because he appears entirely unattracted to either the Widow Davies or his own wife, both of whom are attractive woman who are, for the most part, available to him at all times during the story. Save one extremely tepid kiss on the cheek, Barrie and his wife are at no time seen in a romantic way (possibly the director's ham-handed way of suggesting marital strife, though even unhappy couples probably pretend in public now and again). And, though Barrie's refusal to accept reality and insistance on living in the fantasy world of imagination might suggest a freedom from conventional morality, he never once even seems remotely tempted to move his relationship with the Widow Davies in a romantic direction.

I recognize that the film is rated PG, and obviously someone thought it would have appeal for families (though I think children would be extremely bored by this nonsense, as I was). But in taking on themes of love, infidelity, marriage and family, Forster cheats by not really dealing with any of them head-on. He allows all of the details to slide into the margins, focusing the movie intently on praising Barrie for his upbeat outlook, and condemning those curmudgeons whose solemnity and seriousness would not allow them to appreciate his good humor.

That there is barely a whiff of sexuality to any of Barrie's relationships, child or adult, might be forgivable, if the film had higher concepts on its mind, but it decidedly refuses to engage in any matter that might be in the least bit innovative or interesting. For example, though Barrie is shown playing Cowboys and Indians with the boys, thereby fortelling of the inclusion of Indians in his play, the racism in the depiction of Native Americans in "Peter Pan" is overlooked entirely. The character of Tiger Lily, despite being a major character in the play, is mentioned only once by name, off-handedly by Dustin Hoffman, in a forgettable side role as Barrie's American producer. And she is seen one time as well, near the film's end, but not identified. Obviously, Forster had aimed his film elsewhere, but would the inclusion of small details like these not have given his world a bit of added realism? Was it impossible to fit in some actual storytelling in with all the sickly coughing and tomfoolery?

Forster is a man who seems totally lacking in subtlety. In Monster's Ball, he took a film that could have been a meditation on racism and loneliness, and turned it into a melodramatic mess, an endless stream of tragedy that left the viewer not so much moved as numb. This is a man who is willing to run over a fat kid with a car to make a point, willing to debase his actor's by shooting one of the ugliest sex scenes ever filmed, willing to kill three, four characters in the course of an hour. Whatever it takes to move someone, to get that one person in the theater who always cries at movies to cry. And now, in Neverland, he's at it again. On top of the aforementioned near-fatal accident, there's a failed marriage, a dead father, a dead brother, a sick mother and a dead husband. And that's not even mentioning all the fairies that died because kids didn't believe in them.

A movie like this needs a delicate touch to pull off. Inspirational, moving drama is fleeting and fragile. Once you get that feeling that someone is trying too hard, when there is strain evident to wrench pathos from a situation, a movie falls flat on its ass. Think Patch Adams - a movie with a silly but reasonable-enough premise: a doctor who heals patience through laughter as well as good medicine. But the movie stinks, because director Tom Shadyac couldn't stop pathetically begging his audience for approval for one second. When he wasn't celebrating Robin Williams inane schtick, he was telling us through cinematography and musical cues how great this guy was, how we should all be more like him. And that's J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. By the end, you can practically hear Forster weeping on the soundtrack. The film reverberates with the thirst for acclaim: award me, tell your friends about me, just don't doubt my power, my energy, my sadness. Shut up, I say.

I mentioned that Kate Winslet is underused. She's playing a harried mother of four, and she does well enough at reflecting how enamored this woman and her family becomes of this strange man in their lives. But, though the film indulges itself in seemingly endless "fantasy" sequences, in which the imagination of Barrie comes to life through cheeseball special effects made to look like stagecraft, the actors are never really called upon to reflect any kind of real wonderment. Winslet already has demonstrated she can interact with fantasy, as in Peter Jackson's tremendous Heavenly Creatures.

In that film, as in this one, Winslet's character befriends an oddly imaginative person and they become embroiled in a limited fantasy world of their own. But in that movie, the performances rose above the special effects, to capture the importance of these visions to the characters. Here, it's all spelled out neatly for us: Barrie makes wondrous worlds of cheeseball special effects appear to people wherever he goes. Why, he's just like a grown-up Peter Pan! Aw, shucks.

Plus, there's a whole lot of horrible, horrible dialogue about looking in your heart in order to find Neverland, a magical place where nothing hurts and everything is magical and your parents don't ever die and your shrewish wife doesn't tell you to come home for supper when you are out playing pirates with your cool new 8 year old friends. Everybody's asking Mr. Barrie how to find the way to Neverland. Haven't they even read his damn play? It's second star to the right and straight on till morning, assholes.

This stuff is pure hokum. Finding Neverland is the cinematic equivalent to a 64-ounce Dr. Pepper from 7-11. It will fill you up for a few hours, but it's just empty calories, so you won't get anything out of the experience except a mild feeling of indigestion and a taste for bean and cheese burriots. At least, that's what happened to me.