if you like peter pan (i do!) you might like this movie. but probably not.
it IS a damn shame because i do like the two leads, i like dustin hoffman, i like radha mitchell, you better believe i like julie christie.
― s1ocki (slutsky), Tuesday, 9 November 2004 05:13 (twenty-one years ago)
two months pass...
My gf finally dragged me to this last night. I actually liked it rather well so I wnet back and dredges this up from Anthony Lan'e spiece in the New Yorker:
"“Finding Neverland” is a weepie, and some viewers will mock it on that score, but it needs to be defended. First, because these days a good weepie is hard to find. And, second, because there is so much to weep about—far more, in fact, than you would gather from the film, which closes decorously after the death of Sylvia. (If you want a more accurate and leisurely testament, you could go online and order the DVD of “J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys”—a wonderful TV drama, written by Andrew Birkin and running to four and a half hours, that the BBC produced in 1978, with Ian Holm providing the definitive Barrie.) From the moment that Barrie met George and Jack, and started to ponder the means by which they might be rendered immortal, the story becomes a dismal catalogue of mortality:
1907—Arthur Llewellyn Davies dies from cancer of the jaw.
1910—Sylvia dies of lung cancer. The five boys are orphaned; Barrie is made their guardian.
1915—George is killed in the First World War, fighting with his regiment in Flanders.
1921—Michael, an undergraduate at Oxford, is drowned while swimming with a friend. The two bodies, when recovered, are found clinging together.
All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be thankful that he didn’t live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie’s birth and thus, one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan”—“that terrible masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies. His numerous comments on the genesis of the work, as quoted in Janet Dunbar’s 1970 biography of Barrie, are judicious, amused, and apparently unperturbed. But the effect of “Peter Pan” was like that of those iron bars on the hero’s family home; it is a kind of prison drama played onstage as a slice of festive cheer, and it locked the Llewellyn Davies boys into the garden of pre-puberty as surely as Pan himself is locked out from his mother’s embrace."
― Michael White (Hereward), Friday, 4 February 2005 16:59 (twenty-one years ago)