SPOILER ALERT
Finding Neverland is an apparently typical, child-friendly, utterly mainstream movie. It has quality performances (by old favorites Depp and Winslet and Radha Mitchell especially), pretty production values and heart-warming sentiment enough that folks emerge from it using words like "sweet" and "charming", and determining to bring the kids. And it is, indeed, all those things, except utterly mainstream. It is, rather, at its core, fascinatingly subversive.
Its story follows JM Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which inspired him to write his masterpiece, Peter Pan. In the film there are four boys, their father is dead from cancer, their mother slowly ailing towards early death while a romantic but unconsummated bond forms between her and the unhappily married Barrie. In truth, there were five boys, their father was very much alive and not pleased to be replaced in his brood's affection by the meddling Barrie. There was no romantic bond between Barrie and the mater; in fact, one of the boys in adulthood said he thought Barrie was completely asexual in every direction (see Birkin, below). In addition, once you've read the ultimate fates of these Lost Boys, "sweet" and "charming" become so overwhelmed by the louring darkness as to become inapplicable.
Andrew Birkin's book JM Barrie and the Lost Boys quotes Robert Boothby, later a Lord of the Realm and a friend at Eton of Michael's, who was Barrie's favorite of the boys: "It was an extraordinary relationship between them -- an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him... He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius." Nico, the youngest of the clan, responds: "I am quite unable to admit that JMB's influence was 'unhealthy': oppressive maybe and over-constant..." In the end, only two of the boys survived into a peaceful old age. One died in the trenches of Flanders in WWI, a second threw himself under a subway train, and the golden Michael, whose classmates lauded him as touched with grace and genius, drowned at 21, another possible suicide.
None of that has anything to do with this movie, though, which sidesteps history almost entirely, as is Hollywood's wont and god-given right. Depp hits just the right levels as Barrie to deliver a man whose secret with children is that he treats them as equals, as ready to learn from them as teach them. The sentiment is underplayed and even the maternal death avoids the quagmire of the maudlin.
The extraordinary thing about it is its message, which is very plainly stated and reinforced throughout: that life is nasty, brutish, short and filled with pain, and the way to be happy is to retreat from reality into a world of dreams. If that sounds sweet, then you haven't thought it through. Every so often this philosophy will shape a brilliant mind which creates a Peter Pan; far more frequently you'll get opium addicts, full-time gamers, or anti-ambitious, layabout film critics. In America today, stillness and introversion are tolerated only on the understanding that these periods of gestation will lead to later flurries of activity which will in turn (and this is crucial) result in the acquisition of wealth. Dreaming for its own sake is still, more than a century past the Victorians, suspicious behaviour just this side of the criminal. Because Barrie is earning a living and the respect of his peers through his dreaming on paper, the message gets an implied sugar-coating, but it doesn't take much scratching to get through the veneer to a radical vision: retreat however you can, escape however you can, and spend your life in dreams.
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