FilmRoar

First a warning: Watching Finding Neverland will make you cry. No, I don’t really care if you are a navy seal and find hunting catching rattlesnakes in the dessert with your teeth an appropriate and amusing weekend activity, you too will cry. Ok, maybe you wont let your ophidiliac buddies see an actual tear drop but you will mist up and have to walk away to get another beer near the movies end. That warning having been given if a touching and beautiful movie is your cup of tea, you should not give Finding Neverland a miss.

The movie stars the impressive Johny Depp in his most sedate role in years as author J.M. Barrie. Unhappily married to a beautiful socialite (Radha Mitchell), Barrie spends his evenings writing in the park where he meets Sylvia Davies (Kate Winslet) a sickly widow left to care for four unbelievably well behaved young boys. The plot from this point out is quite predictable: Depp becomes ‘uncle Jim’ to the children and the suggestion of amorous or sexual impropriety between him and Winslet tears his marriage apart and hurts both of their social standings. Winslet becomes sicker and the director Marc Forster slowly starts wrenching out the tears. There is a scene near the end where Peter, the youngest of the kids sits on a bench as the camera slowly pulls in to show his big blue eyes. It is around this point I began to swear at the movie with ‘Oh, don’t make the big eyed kid cry!’ but of course they did and of course so did my movie watching companion… and yes, I will admit it, so did I.

Aside from the predictable and lacrimonious plot Finding Neverland is notable for the regular and smooth transitions between the reality of the characters and their communal world of fantasy. The transitions are smooth and very reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) though in this case the effects are a bit more subtle and seamlessly interweave with the main action. What sells the effects though is the conviction with which the actors, both adult and child, interact in each world with little concern to which reality is ‘real’.

I was on set again yesterday. The day was miserable with strong wind and incessant rain that varied from light to heavy showers. The temperature only got down to 45 degrees but with my jeans soaked through after standing in place for two hours while they blocked the ‘funeral’ shot I was pretty miserable. They kept me on set all day though I only had to stand-in for the one shot. During the rest of the day I either searched for the shelter of whatever production tent was available or more often resigned myself to being cold and went and wondered near set (I could not wonder far since I had to be able to hear the call for second team and report to set). I finally got a readable call sheet (now unreadable because the rain soaked through the first layer of my rain coat) and found out the actor I was standing in for is Jay O. Sanders who according to the IMDB is actually 6′4″.

The director (who I am no longer sure was Brent Shields since I could swear people were calling him ‘Sean’ on set) was yet again being a dick though you could tell the crew was pretty much used to it and had developed ways to dealing (like one crew member said on set: his name begins with ‘d’ and ends with ‘ick’). I also found out one of the reasons why people were so stressed out on Friday, it turns out a local woman known to a lot of the extras had committed suicide in her house mid-day. A lot of people were shocked and upset and could not be kept from wondering through set. I also found out the sound and camera crews were up from L.A. while the grips and gaffers were local. There is a definite set hierarchy that I don’t see on our small budget productions. A new stand-in almost accidentally sat with the actors and was warned that would be incredibly bad. I also tried to breach protocol and talk to one of the ADs on set and was shot down. In general it seems the higher up in the chain the more of a jerk the person. The key PA Anne and another PA Sarah, as well as the caterers and extras handlers were all quite wonderful though. I am curious if this rule of “higher up = bigger jerk” is true on all or most sets.. guess I will have to keep my eyes open and find out. All in all, still a good day though. Weird.