uccessful Scottish writer Sir James M. Barrie (Depp) has hit a rough patch. His latest London play has flopped, and his marriage to Mary Ansell (Radha Mitchell) has cooled. Taking his beloved Newfoundland dog Porthos to Kensington Park, he make the acquaintance of four young boys—Jack (Joe Prospero), George (Nicholas Roud), Michael (Luke Spill) and Peter (Freddie Highmore)—and their mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Winslet). Barrie is charmed by the boys, and they with him, especially after he fires their imaginations with an impromptu dance with Porthos.
Only later does Barrie learn that Sylvia is recently widowed, having lost her husband and the boys' father to cancer the year before. Young Peter has taken the loss particularly hard.
Barrie starts to spend more time with Sylvia and the boys in the park and at their home, engaging them in games of high imagination: pirates on the high seas, cowboys and Indians. As the days wear on, Sylvia's mother, Mrs. Du Maurier (Christie), takes notice. Mr. Barrie's attentions are not entirely appropriate, she tells Sylvia.
Meanwhile, Barrie's theatrical producer, the American Charles Frohman (Hoffman), is worried that Barrie isn't working on anything new. Not so, Barrie tells him. And, to Frohman's horror, Barrie begins to recount his idea for a play about a boy who never grows up and a fantastical island called Neverland.
As Barrie grows closer to the Llewelyn Davies family, he hears that others in his tight social circle have started to cluck their tongues and wonder whether he has an unhealthy interest in the boys or their mother. He is shocked at such gossip—but it doesn't dissuade him from spending ever more time with them.
During a retreat at Barrie's summer home, Sylvia falls ill. Meanwhile, Mary presents Barrie with an ultimatum: Spend less time with the Llewelyn Davies family and more with me. Or else.
The truth beneath the fantasy
This year marks the centenary of Peter Pan's premiere in London, and Finding Neverland offers a fictionalized account of Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family and the subsequent creation of his masterpiece. Neverland features stellar performances and hits all the right emotional notes, managing to stay just this side of tear-jerking manipulation. Forster (Monster's Ball) also finds the magic in the story with imaginative recreations of Barrie's fantasy world as the boys might have seen it in their minds.
But for all its virtues, Neverland seems to skim over the surface of the story, like a pirate ship on a moonlit sea, offering precious little insight into the events that led to Barrie's deathless contribution to fantasy.
Instead, it tantalizes viewers with glimpses of the roiling emotions beneath the almost unbearable tragedy that underpinned Barrie's relationships with the family and that counterbalanced his imaginative flights of fancy. Like the counterweights that enabled his Peter Pan characters to simulate flight in the theater, it is the real-life drama of Barrie's own failing marriage, his unspoken feelings for Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and his abiding affection for the Llewelyn Davies children that anchor his imagination and imbue Peter Pan with such emotional resonance.
Yet the audience can only infer this. The script, based on Knee's hit play The Man Who Was Peter Pan, dances lightly over this reality, otherwise restraining his characters' feelings as tightly as the corsets that bind them. In the place of the undoubtedly messy reality of Barrie's life and relations with the Llewelyn Davies, the audience instead gets a tidy recounting of Peter Pan's genesis in the string of "perfect days" that Barrie shared with the family, interspersed with fleeing moments of sanitized sturm-and-drang, mainly in the person of Christie's caricatured grandmother. The tragic yet hopeful message is underscored at the end: Just believe, and everything will turn out all right.
Of course, such a message belies the poignant irony that tragedy would continue to befall the Llewelyn Davies boys, several of whom died prematurely long after the events of the film, though Peter Pan himself lives on.
But it would be curmudgeonly not to like Neverland for what it accomplishes, and that's a lot. Depp proves again that he is a masterful actor, perfectly embodying the man who wouldn't grow up and imbuing the role with what depth it has. Winslet, similarly, fleshes out her sketchy role as the beleaguered and grief-stricken Sylvia with more emotion than actually appears in the script.
