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Finding Neverland
Directed by Marc Forster
Written by David Magee from Allan Knee's stage play
Starring Johnny Depp, Radha Mitchell, Kate Winslet
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Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow old, is also the story that re-fuses to stop being told. James M. Barrie's play Peter Pan has been filmed and staged endlessly since its debut in 1905. Many people know the famed Mary Martin 1955 Broadway version (filmed for television in 1960) and the 1954 Disney cartoon version-- which is horrible beyond description. But there are other screen versions-- including a lovely silent film with Ernest Torrance as Captain Hook and Anna Mae Wong as Tiger Lily-- and several television renditions as well. And only last year, Australian director P.J. Hogan (who directed My Best Friend's Wedding) released a startling, highly sexualized version-- with an actual boy, not a grown woman, playing Peter Pan-- that was nothing less then remarkable.

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Indeed, it was Hogan's Peter Pan that really got at the heart of the play. Peter Pan has been trivialized as a children's story over the years, but it is much more. Pan is, of course, the ultimate boy rebel. It's not that he is just impish, he's both an outcast from civilization and its critic. He doesn't fit-in and he revels in his ability to exist apart. And he's sexy, well erotic. And this was the genius of Hogan's film-- it was riddled with eroticism. Wendy had the hots for Peter, Peter had the hots for Wendy, Captain Hook had the hots for Peter, and the Lost Boys had the hots for everyone. As I wrote here last year, Hogan's Peter Pan was "a cross between a soft-core porn version of The Lord of the Flies and a cheesy nudie magazine that has been forced to toss some leaves and vines on its models."

Now, Finding Neverland-- released in theater three months ago and now just out on DVD-- gives us the story (well, sort of the story) behind James M. Barrie writing Peter Pan, and it's as sexy and fascinating as the play itself. Directed by Marc Forster, and written by David Magee from Allan Knee's stage play, Finding Neverland details the year or so in 1904 that Barrie (Johnny Depp) essentially left his devoted wife Mary (Radha Mitchell) after he meets the widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her five young boys. Barrie meets the widowed Sylvia with her boys in St. James Park and is immediately smitten. He begins to visit them, give them presents, give the family money, a summer home, and generally moves in with them-- emotionally and psychologically, if not particularly physically.

This causes Victorian London to talk-- the film has the integrity to report that gossips connected him sexually not only to Sylvia but to the children as well-- and Mary soon leaves her husband. And although he was caught in an ugly divorce case, the upside for Barrie is that this new relationship-- with the boys-- prompted him to write Peter Pan.

The story of Barrie's attachment to the Llewelyn Davies family has been told repeatedly over the past two decades-- perhaps best in Andrew Birkin's excellent 1979 book James M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Love Story that Gave Birth to Peter Pan, which has been re-released by Yale University Press-- but this is the first film version of the story.

Forster's film veers to the sentimental-- in a PBSish manner that is not unintelligent, even as it avoids the harder issues. But more than any other recent film, Finding Neverland charts the complicated emotional relationship that adults can (but hardly every do) have with children. Depp is great at showing how taken Barrie is with the boys-- he seems fond of their mother, but in a sisterly sort of way-- and how much they inspire him. Virginia Woolf wrote, famously, "women alone stir my imagination"-- the erotic lesbian creative urge-- and it is clear in Finding Neverland that it is the eroticism of these boys that stirs James Barrie. He comes alive with them and he caters to their fantasies, fears, and joys. There's an innocence here that's quite disarming, not because it's just innocent, but because we can see and feel the eroticism beneath. Finding Neverland is quite careful not to show this relationship as being overtly sexual-- that would've been quite a different film-- but it does really, in some subtle and amazing ways, portray a complicated erotic relationship between an adult man and boys.

We will never know what went on in Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys-- the best guess is that it was probably deeply erotic and completely asexual; from everything we know about Barrie he seemed very disinterested in physical sex. But Finding Neverland makes a respectable and valiant stab at uncovering the complexities here. While it could have easily avoided the emotional intricacy of the situation by inventing a full-fledged romance between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, Finding Neverland ventures instead-- albeit it very cautiously-- into a more difficult realm.

The intensity of Depp's performance-- and he is as intense as he usually is-- is revealing. We can feel that the boys are an inspiration to him, but we also feel that there's something deeper there. Something that is not exactly sexual-- although the boys are photographed in the most charming and sexy manner-- but profoundly erotic and life-affirming. On one level Finding Neverland is about death-- Sylvia is widowed just before the film begins, and then dies toward the end of it; Barrie's own marriage withers away as does his career at the beginning of the film. But it's his relationship with the boys that keep him and the movie so exciting and vibrant.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com