Movie: Finding Neverland

Director: Marc Forster

Starring: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman

If you’ve watched the same director’s monstrously tragic ‘Monster’s Ball’, you’d know why ‘Finding Neverland’ is so therapeutic for Marc Forster and the audience. In the director’s earlier work, Halle Berry played a mother who grieves for a dead son. In ‘Finding Neverland’, the tables are turned. It’s the child who must come to terms with the mother’s death.

This is a wispy film that whispers silent prayers of gratitude for the gift of life. Based on true facts surrounding the life of early 20th century Scottish playwright James Barrie (Johnny Depp), the film takes you into a world governed by unspoken grief and glory, and yet it’s capable of outbursts of tremendous pain and rapture. The ambience of staged splendour is superbly created. As the playwright-hero creates on stage, he also lives out a strange life of longing. The periodicity is never questionable. But the tenor is constantly normal and routine. And yet questions on the quality of life haunt Barrie’s life as a career and family man.

The ultra-picky Depp again captures his character in contoured precision. Barrie’s growing fondness for a family away from his sterile marriage is ably captured by Depp’s deep interpretation of a rather shallow social system. The family that Barrie ‘adopts’ and finally uses to create his most famous character of Peter Pan is portrayed as a father-less nucleus. Barrie’s rapport with the widow Sylvia’s (Kate Winslet) four sons is the highlight of the plot, and so’s the friction that he develops with Sylvia’s mother.

Sylvia’s approaching death heralds the film’s sweetest philosophical thrust. You often wonder why American films are so successful at synthesising sweetness with tragedy. Here’s the answer. ‘Finding Neverland’ creates a world of adult angst with children at its centre. In doing so, it builds a state of unfettered innocence and harmony. Though there isn’t much rapport between Depp and Winslet, the bonding between Depp and the children, specially little Peter on whom the evergreen Peter Pan character is based is heart-warmingly tangible. You cannot get the last sequence out of your mind — in which Depp sits down with Peter in a verdant park on a bench to talk about Sylvia whom both of them loved. It’s such a beautifully packaged moment of poignancy, you feel happy to be blissfully manipulated into sublime submission. ‘Finding Neverland’ is a slight but moving exposition on the power of the imagination to heal. — HNS