Review: Finding Neverland

Playwright J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) meets Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her four boys and quickly befriends them. The bond between this family and Barrie is met with much social gossip and Barrie’s marriage to wife Mary (Radha Mitchell) suffers greatly as a result as well. However, it’s through the four boys that Barrie finds inspiration for his next work. Julie Christie plays Sylvia’s overprotective mother, Toby Jones plays an actor, Ian Hart turns up as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dustin Hoffman is Barrie’s American financier.

 

Maybe it’s because I only got around to seeing it in 2017, but this 2004 Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball”, “Stranger Than Fiction”) biopic for me isn’t anything brilliant or Oscar-worthy. It’s a nice, sweet film that I rather enjoyed, but the hoopla I don’t quite get. Scripted by David Magee (the excellent “Life of Pi”) from a play by Allan Knee, it’s a bit clichéd and predictable, but solid and boasting lovely performances by Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.

 

Although he doesn’t nail it, Depp gives it a bloody good try with the Scottish brogue. He nearly manages to not sound like he’s putting on an accent. Nearly, but not quite. He shows, accent aside that he can give a serious and solid performance free of eccentricity for the most part. Barrie himself is probably an eccentric enough character to begin with. He has good chemistry with both Kate Winslet and the kids. Winslet is lovely as usual (if not very convincingly sick), even if her character is a bit of a cliché. True story or not (and it openly admits to being ‘Inspired’ by a true story), as soon as Winslet starts to have a bad cough, you don’t feel like you’re in an earlier time, you feel like you’re watching a movie from an earlier time about a story from an even earlier time. That’s not the same thing, obviously. There’s lots of clever and interesting stuff for those in-the-know, such as Barrie makes up adventures for them to act out like pirate stories that eventually inspire his work. So I liked all of that, and I think Radha Mitchell does her damn best with a not very good role. However, Julie Christie is saddled with a one-dimensional part she can’t get around, and I have no idea why Dustin Hoffman bothered turning up in such a small capacity. Wasted doesn’t even begin to describe his treatment in a nothing role, and he completely phones it in for all the lack of effort it’s worth.

 

This may just be me reading into it, but one of the more interesting things about the film is that there’s a slight Michael Jackson vibe about Barrie’s relationship with the children, or at least other people’s gossip about it. Barrie is far more believably innocent though, than MJ perhaps was (For the record, I don’t believe MJ was a child molester. He just wasn’t very credibly innocent). Other people may not see the resemblance, but I felt it was there (MJ did name his estate Neverland for fuck’s sake) and rather interesting.

 

It’s a nice film, pretty solid actually, but not one I’m going to remember much over the years. It’s a fairly traditional and ‘safe’ biopic, albeit one ‘inspired’ by fact rather than ‘based’ on fact. Good performances by the leads are a major asset, Barrie buffs/historians may object to a whole plethora of liberties taken with the facts.

 

Rating: B-