Finding Neverland, directed by Marc Forster, is a biopic about a critical period in the life of J. M. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp). When the film begins, forty-three-year-old Barrie is nervous about the fate of an opening night performance of his latest play in London during 1903. The play turns out to be a flop, so the next day he decides to take a walk in a park near his townhome. While in the park, he encounters the Llewelyn Davies family, consisting of a single mother, Sylvia (played by Kate Winslet), and four boys; he is especially fascinated by the youngest, Peter (played by Freddie Highmore). Barrie is so enamored of the circumstances of the family that he finds a way to continue contact, including games of cowboys and Indians, and he begins to conceive of a Neverland beyond the cares and pain of everyday life. Barrie sees in the happiness of the family despite adversity the childhood that he always wanted but was denied in his youth; similar to Peter, who grieves for his deceased father and perceives adult lies only too clearly, Barrie was forced to be an adult without having the opportunity to be a child. The experience with the Llewelyn Davies family inspires him to write the play Peter Pan, often subtitled The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Financed as before by Charles Frohman (played by Dustin Hoffman), the play becomes his greatest success when on opening night he stacks the audience with twenty-five preteen orphans whose laughter at the antics of the characters becomes contagious to the stuffed-shirt adults who in his previous plays had failed to see his genius. However, as he grows closer to the family, his wife Mary (played by Radha Mitchell) feels more distant; she has not inspired him, and they had no children of their own. They inevitably separate, not long after malicious and entirely false rumors spread that Barrie is committing adultery as well as pedophilia, as Arthur Conan Doyle (played by Ian Hart) informs him one day. Meanwhile, Sylvia's health is failing to the point where she is an invalid. When Sylvia's mother, Emma du Maurier (played by Julie Christie), moves in to take care of her daughter, she tries to keep Barrie away until she realizes that his attention is curative. In a final scene, Barrie organizes a performance of Peter Pan in Sylvia's townhome, as she is too weak to attend the theater. Inside the garden, he provides her with a menagerie of costumed animals that is the Neverland that he has long been promising. The cinematic version is best at portraying deep emotions, and indeed some filmviewers will leave with tears in their eyes. However, Mr. Llewelyn Davies was in fact still alive in 1904, and Sylvia was in excellent health at the time when Peter Pan debuted that year, exactly one century ago. The play was rewritten and lengthened over the years until taking the present form in 1928. The tagline "Unlock your imagination" well expresses what the film is trying to convey as Barrie's special discovery. The next entertainer who grasped the concepts of J. M. Barrie, who brought adults and children together on an innocent common ground, was of course Walt Disney, yet the film's adaptation of Alan Knee's play The Man Who Was Peter Pan strangely is financed by a studio other than Walt Disney Productions. MH
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