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’.