The Greatest Trick

I should write a lot more about this but I’m not going to, partly because it’s late and partly because I’ve got things to do that should be regarded as more worth my time. Finding Neverland is the mostly true story of the inspiration for J M Barrie’s Peter Pan. Barrie (Johnny Depp, always superb), a struggling playwright working in turn-of-the-century London, trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman more obsessed with furthering her social standing than having anything to do with her husband, meets a family of four boys and their widowed mother, played by Kate Winslet. The Llewellyn-Davies family, with its energy and child-focussed nature, inspires Barrie to write his next play, and he engages them in friendship at considerable personal cost. He takes the boys on trips through their imagination to the Wild West and pirate ships, and encourages them to explore their creative sides, even though the loss of their father is forcing some of them to grow up and become disenchanted with life too soon. As he observes them, plays with them, laughs and cries with them and particularly with Peter, played by Freddie Highmore, he writes his masterpiece.

A more personal movie about a celebrity is hard to find. This is exactly what Barrie was in his society, but he as portrayed by Depp is totally out of his depth in that kind of environment, and totally at home playing make-believe with 4 boisterous boys. We often see the movie shift into full-blown imaginary environments which are lovely to behold; director Marc Forster does a wonderful job with these sequences, and also with giving us a very child-like viewpoint in many scenes, literally. For example: you see the boys looking upstairs to check how their mum is when taken ill, and all that can be seen is the 2 pairs of shoes of the people talking on the landing. The movie speaks to adults and kids alike, having such a young-hearted central character and an actually young supporting cast, and gives a wonderful picture of what family can be.

There is much more to be said than I’m going to here, but just a word about the ending, which was a slight disappointment (so please don’t read the rest if you haven’t seen the film). Barrie’s fixation with not growing up (a la Peter Pan himself) is odd and worrying to some of the people around him, but he says lots of good things to the boys about the need for them to reach the point where they become men rather than boys. However, when he tells Peter at the end that he’ll always be able to see his mum even though she’s no longer there, through his imagination, it feels like a lie told to aid his grieving, which is what Peter was so upset about earlier in the film. Not only that, but it reinforces the notion of not letting go and growing up past that point, but of holding onto the past - and when that past involves a dead loved one, we all know how unhealthy that can be. As well as this, it goes against my beliefs about life & death, which was a shame as the rest of the film had been great.