(2004) There are those who pretend at love and living life to the fullest; believers, on the other hand - those rare, beautiful souls - are the only ones who will find their way to Neverland. "What's it like, Neverland?" asks Sylvia.

Based on Allan Knee's play, The Man Who Was Peter Pan, Marc Forster directed this dramatic movie, starring Johnny Depp, revealing the backstory to the creation of J.M. Barrie's memorable characters; Jan A. P. Kaczmarek's score received an Oscar.

In London 1903 at the Duke of York's Theatre, Barrie's play has flopped - newspaper review, "fails to impress" - costing his friend Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman) a fortune to produce. In a park, using a fishing pole tethering a ball for casting, Barrie exercises his Newfoundland dog Porthos when he encounters Michael (Luke Spill), George (Nick Roud), Jack (Joe Prospero), Peter (Freddie Highmore), and their widowed, impecunious mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslett).

Barrie, in a childless marriage, begins spending more and more of his time playing make-believe games with the four "lost boys" and offering the services of his house staff to their mother to the consternation of Kate's disciplinarian mother, Madame Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie) - chiding him that he has his own wife to protect and take care of - and his wife (Radha Mitchell) Mary's jealousy (after she realizes that social advancement through contact with the famous du Maurier family isn't James's intention).

Sensitive little Peter, however, ("trying to grow up too fast" since his father's death) the hardest to win over to believing in the silliness of a dog becoming a bear and other imaginative acts, reacts by saying to Barrie: "You're not my father." Having lost his younger brother David as a child and been ignored by his mother, Barrie empathizes with Peter by encouraging his early interest in writing and putting on a play, teaching him to trust in his own imagination.

Meanwhile, Barrie has been writing a new play based on his magical summer with the children, developing the characters of Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, the Darling children, Captain Hook and the pirates, the crocodile, and the Indians. Convincing Charles to back his new stage conception is relatively easy, but ugly rumors and evil gossip have begun to question Barrie's relationship as a playmate of children and his seeing more of the widow than his own wife.

When Sylvia's "little chest cold" appears to be worse than she's willing to admit, Peter angrily says of her pretending she's not seriously ill: "I'm sick of grown-ups lying to me; I won't be made a fool."

Coming home late one night, Barrie finds Mary in a serious discussion about government censorship with Gilbert Cannan, but James says he's not ready for a serious conversation about their marriage. "I was hopelessly naïve when I married you," she confesses (though she wanted him to take her to Neverland), feeling separated from him by his muse and his imagination.

Peter Pan (Kelly MacDonald) in the play says to Wendy: "To die will be an awfully big adventure." Opposed to pretending, believing makes things otherwise.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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