Summary
Film of the week Finding Neverland (PG) 3/5 Dir: Marc Forster With: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Freddie Highmore, Radha Mitchell, Dustin Hoffman Johnny Depp in a film aboutPeter Pan? It was only a matter of time. A 41-year-old still in almost disturbingly full possession of his youthful bloom, who shuns conventional leading man slots in favour of childlike characters, Depp is already enshrined as Hollywood's most potent embodiment of arrested innocence. Sex symbol he may be, but his screen image is one of fairy-tale detachment and sexual ambiguity - suggestive of a certain inherent kinship with J M Barrie's "boy who never grew up."
Depp is cast not as Peter himself (that honour goes to Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald, in a lovely cameo), but as Barrie, whose creative process is here subjected to the fast-and-loose interpretative fashions currently prevalent in biopic production.See the full content of this document
Extract
Playful Pan's People
Adapted by David Magee from Allen Knee's stage play The Man Who Was Peter Pan, the film whips Barrie's inspiring friendship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her children into a neat narrative shape not quite concurrent with reality. Sylvia's widowhood is brought forward in time, as is her own illness and death. A youngest child is simply omitted (his birth being inconsistent with Sylvia's single status). Nor did the famously scrawny and unprepossessing Barrie bear much real-life resemblance to the helplessly glamorous Depp, whose blatant genetic bounty has always been something of an obstruction to his efforts to embody weedy and inconspicuous figures.
Still, historical accuracy is no...See the full content of this document
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