I can’t tell you about Kinsey like I promised yesterday. After a successful weigh-in (notice my new numbers up on my ticker!) we “pigged” out at Hoggy’s, then changed our minds at the last minute on movies. Instead, we saw Finding Neverland where I got my dose of Depp-itude and Johnny got his dose of Winslet-y goodness. The movie is about how J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, and it was very good. Not Oscar-nomination worthy, but definitely entertaining and touching. And speaking of touching….
Ok, so the movie account of anyone’s life is going to gloss over certain parts, and change some events to make them more audience-friendly and to keep the story going. In the movie, Barrie (played by Depp using a Scottish accent, *drool*) is married to a woman who doesn’t seem to want to have anything to do with his boyish ways. He goes to the park to write, and meets 4 children, brothers, that he entertains with his stories and antics. He befriends the boys and their mother, the widow Sylvia Llewelen-Davies (played by Winslet using a British accent, *drool*). They spend the summer playing in the park and Barrie lets the Davies’ use his and his wife’s summer cottage in the country that they never go to anymore. Sylvia’s mother doesn’t approve, and is almost cartoonish in her rigidness, which actually works pretty well because she becomes the basis for the cartoonishly rigid mother in the play. Sylvia is sick with a “chest cold” that turns out to be more like “cancer” but she won’t admit it or do anything about it. Barrie’s wife leaves him. Barrie uses his experiences with the family, and with his own brother’s death, to write Peter Pan, which is an instant success. Sylvia dies and names Barrie and her mother co-guardians of the children.
This is all well and good, and makes for a very emotional movie. (I cried.) (But then again, I cry at a lot of things lately, like long-distance phone commercials.) It really glosses over some of the details of Barrie’s life though. This is taken from The Straight Dope webpage, which got it from J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth to Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin.
The seventh child of a Scottish weaver, Barrie possessed the two prerequisites of artistic greatness: talent and an unhappy childhood. Two things contributed significantly to the latter. First, he was very short, barely five feet tall by age 17. Second, he ranked a distant second (if that) in the affections of his mother, whose favorite was his charming, handsome, etc, brother David, who was killed in an accident when not quite 14. James, then 6, attempted to console his desolate parent by adopting the mannerisms of the dead youth. On some level he never stopped, and he remained a boy in spirit all his life.
Still, he was a boy who could write. Barrie moved to London in his mid-20s and enjoyed quick success, first as a journalist, then a novelist, and finally a playwright. Though shy and moody, he met a pretty (and short) young actress named Mary Ansell and married her in 1894.
The marriage was not happy. Barrie was later rumored to be impotent, but it seems more accurate to say he had little interest in sex. At any rate he never succeeded in getting Mary pregnant, though she was anxious for a child. Barrie too loved children–he just preferred to let other people make them. He and Mary began taking walks with their dog in Kensington Gardens, a park near their London home. He became a favorite of the children brought there by their nannies, entertaining them with his antics and stories about pirates and fairies. The children Barrie was fondest of were the young sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. He was an aspiring lawyer; she was beautiful and sweet. Barrie charmed Sylvia as he had charmed her kids and soon insinuated himself into the household, visiting frequently and joining the family on holidays, somewhat to the distress of Mary and Arthur. Ever in need of material, Barrie began incorporating his experiences with the Llewelyn Davieses into his work. The pirate stories he told the boys–eventually there were five: George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico–became the basis for his 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. It was unlike anything ever seen on the stage, among other things requiring an elaborate apparatus to permit the players to fly, but proved a huge hit in Britain and the U.S.
Barrie remained close to the Llewelyn Davies family. When Arthur and Sylvia died of cancer within a few years of each other, the playwright found Sylvia’s handwritten will in which she requested that Jenny, the sister of the boys’ nanny, help look after them. In copying the document for Sylvia’s mother Barrie mistranscribed “Jenny” as “Jimmy,” i.e., himself–unintentionally, according to Birkin. But even if he did it on purpose, family and friends agree he alone had the resources to take care of the boys, and he became their guardian. Judging from their correspondence, Barrie was part father to the five, part mother, and part . . . well, lover gives the wrong idea, but he was emotionally attached to a degree some found morbid, to George and Michael particularly. George was killed during World War I, however, and Michael drowned at Oxford in 1921. (Some suspected it was suicide.) Peter, who became a successful publisher, threw himself under a London subway train in 1960. You may think: these were troubled folk. Maybe so, but no evidence survives to pin the blame on Barrie, who died in 1937. As for pedophilia, Nico offered what, barring some shocking revelation, will surely stand as the last word on Barrie’s sexuality, or lack of it: “He was an innocent–which is why he could write Peter Pan.”
First of all, there is no mention in the movie of Barrie’s wife wanting kids. There’s also no mention of either of them being short, but that really doesn’t matter all that much. Secondly, the movie doesn’t even hint at the fact that maybe Mary used to go to the park with James. She seems distant and cold from the get-go. Thirdly, and very importantly, Arthur Llewelen-Davies is already dead when Barrie meets the rest of the family in the movie. That’s a pretty big change, don’t you think? And it also keeps Sylvia from having her 5th child, who isn’t even mentioned in the movie. Also very importantly is the whole transcribing of the will thing. I know it was 1904 but that’s still a pretty big “unintentional transcription error”. And as for Barrie being overly emotionally attached to two of the boys, well, I’m glad they left that out of the movie, frankly. I’m not suggesting that it was right if Barrie was sexually active with them, but if he was it apparently happened outside of the timeline of the movie.
Like I said, I don’t really think Finding Neverland deserved a Best Picture nomination. It dragged in a few parts, but mostly it just wasn’t that unique enough to be nominated, in my opinion. I do think Johnny Depp deserved his nom though, as he was quite good. He really came off as a boy in a man’s body, who genuinely loved having playmates to act out his stories with. And now I want to go and see a production of Peter Pan. I’ve only ever seen the Disney version. And Hook, which I actually somewhat enjoyed. Dustin Hoffman, who played Captain Hook in that movie, was also in Finding Neverland as Barrie’s producer. I wonder if he ever talked about playing Hook, or if he wants to forget he ever did? And Mackenzie Crook also had a bit part in the movie, playing a theatre usher. That would be Gareth from The Office, but he also played a pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean - he was the one with the wooden eye. I’m sure he and Dustin and Johnny all reminisced about their various pirate roles.
