We’ve really lost our imagination. Whether it’s because these days we can pretty much get exactly anything we imagine, or just because we’re dissatisfied, disillusioned, dis-everything post-moderns… we’ve lost it. We could really use a J.M. Barrie to give us something crazy, impossible, new. Who’s gonna look at a bunch of kids jumping on their beds and imagine them flying out the window these days? They’re more likely to think, “I should really stop looking at those kids jumping on their beds before someone thinks I’m weird”, or worse, just tell them to stop.

That’s Finding Neverland in a nutshell, for me, at least. It’s a beautiful story about a guy brave enough, or perhaps just naive enough, to bring innocence and imagination back to the far too grown-ups around him. This is best put in the movie at the premiere of the play “Peter Pan” – J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) tells the play’s producer (Dustin Hoffmann) to keep 25 seats free, giving no explanation or reason; finally, the surprise guests arrive – children from the local orphanage – and Barrie’s intentions are made abundantly clear, the laughter of the children proving infectious and opening the door for the grown-ups to connect to the story in front of them.

It’s all about growing, not growing up.

Johnny Depp is, of course, brilliant. In the opening scenes he pokes around spying on the audience of one of his plays, hiding like a child at a dinner party, nervous, half Ed Wood, half Edward Scissorhands. This is the perfect role for him: I’m usually quite cynical but Johnny Depp is one big movie star I believe in 100%; that speech in Pirates of the Caribbean, about “what the Black Pearl is… is freedom,” I imagine Depp is behind that 100%; and here, every single aspect of the character he’s playing, I believe that he believes it.

Kate Winslet is better than I’d imagined. She’s not an actress I usually believe in, not really since Heavenly Creatures which is a hell of a movie to top, but here she’s surprisingly restrained.

I really want to see this movie again, ASAP really, ‘cos I’ve struggled to write this much about it and I feel like I haven’t done it justice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2004 at 6:55 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.