Title: The Innocents
Author: Kevin Jackson
Publication: Sight and Sounds
Issue: November 2004
Marc Forster’s unpredictable follow up to his critical success with Monster’s Ball (2001) is a biopic, of sorts, which purports to tell the story of how J.M. Barrie found his inspiration for Peter Pan in his dealings with the Llewelyn Davies family – the originals for the Darlings in the play. Adapted by David Magee from a recent stage piece, The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allen Knee. Finding Neverland is an unusually sober, tactful, thoughtful and thought prompting example of the genre; a rare example of a film aimed at the so-called family audience which will appeal most directly to the mature members of the family rather than the screaming tykes.
Like many other highly literate biopics -Lawrence of Arabia, for instance – it is also a pack of whoppers. Well established facts of chronology and geography are distorted, characters traduced or simply invented, unwarranted speculations passed off as gospel truth. Does this matter? Not greatly, and while some pedantic Barrie fans will no doubt wax apoplectic, their ire will be misplaced. Some of the movie’s trifling’s with reality act mainly to stream line the plot and jerk a few additional tears: standard dramatic license. The most important of them strengthen its ruling theme, which, to put it maybe a shade too pompously, is that of the origins and consolations of art: standard poetic license. Put briefly, Finding Neverland jettisons pedestrian accuracy in the service of mythical truth.
Its principal events – quit reading at this point if you’re the sort of spectator who hates to know that Act Five of Hamlet features lots of blood on the walls – run something like this. Finding Neverland begins in the mode of Topsy Turvy with a lavish first night not that of Peter Pan, but of another of Barrie’s many productions. Little Mary. Mildly against the conventions of showbiz pictures, this first night is a humiliating flop, and one which brings its author ‘Johnny Depp giving a beautifully restrained and subtle performance) up against the gloomy realities of his middle age: waning inspiration and a loveless, childless, sexless marriage. A cleverly contrived symmetrical master shot wordlessly expresses the gap between man and wife: Mary Barrie (Radha Mitchell), to the left of the screen, opens her bedroom door to a dark Edwardian interior; Barrie, to the right, opens his to the warm glow and dazzle of Neverland. He has deserted Mary, not for another woman, but for his inner paradise.
On one of his habitual trips to the nearby rus in urbe of Kensington Gardens, where he tries in vain to dream up new scenarios, Barrie encounters a pack of well-scrubbed little boys – Peter, Jack, George and Michael – and their beautiful widowed mother Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet). It is not quite clear what need they meet in his sad soul, but before long he is an indispensable part of their daily fun, at once playmate and playwright, though the most solemn of the boys, Peter, takes a long time to thaw. His refusal to play, to yield to the pleasures of the imagination, is a terrified defense: he was told his dying father was perfectly well and now thinks all fictions are cruel deceits.
The deeper this unconventional friendship grows, the more profoundly Barrie’s creativity is stirred, and from their assorted romps as pirates and cowboys and Indians he starts to assemble the rudiments of the play that will be Peter Pan. In one of the film’s most agreeable and inventive touches Forster cuts snappily between the real and imaginary dimensions of these games, the latter shot like a lavish Victorian stage presentation with umpteen wooden waves, teeming with wooden sharks, lashing against the sides of a cartoonish galleon.
Unspeakable desires
But London’s tongues are wagging: some cynics suspect Barrie of amorous designs on the glamorous widow, others of much less speak able desires. Sylvia’s mother, a hatchet-faced killjoy (Julie Christie), tries to ban him from their presence, until the oldest boy George rebels and insists that Barrie continue to be welcome in their house. Barrie’s jealous and neglected wife begins a dalliance with rising young lawyer Gilbert Cannan and eventually leaves; Sylvia shows signs of an illness that threatens to be fatal. Against the skepticism of almost everyone concerned, Peter Pan is an immediate, gigantic hit; Sylvia is by now too weak to visit the theatre, so Barrie brings a pocket version of his chef d’oeuvre to her living room. Tears arc universal; she dies at some unspecified but short time later.
Thus the genesis of Peter Pan according to the film. History tells such a different story one could fill a booklet with a detailed list of divergences, but the most striking ones are quickly despatched. First, Sylvia was not a widow: her husband Arthur Llewelyn Davies was heartily alive in 1904 and did not die (of jaw cancer) until four years later. He seems to have found Barrie’s fondness for his boys rather irritating, but the two men grew much closer as his illness progressed. Barrie was in frequent attendance at his sick bed, and Arthur, now incapable of speech, communicated with him by scribbling notes. “I don’t think anyone has ever done so much for me,” he wrote in one of them.
Sylvia herself was no wilting invalid, and in 1904 showed no sign of the cancer that eventually killed her in August 1910. Barrie’s wife Mary was indeed a somewhat remote figure, but her affair with Gilbert Cannon also look place several years after the Peter Pan triumph, in October 1909. (Incidentally, it may be that Barrie was impotent, at least during this stage of his life: one wag of the time called him “the boy who couldn’t go up”, and there were many rumours to the same effect- But his wife’s divorce testimony suggests they had been sexually active in the early years of their marriage.)
More quibbles? Well, there were five Llewelyn Davies boys, not four the film omits the youngest, Nico, presumably to get round the awkward question of who had sired him if Arthur was dead, Charles Frohman Barrie’s loyal American producer, was not present at the London first night of Peter Pan but in New York, anxiously awaiting the audience’s verdict over the telegraph. (Dustin Hoffman, who can hardly be on screen for more than five minutes, is wonderfully droll, world-weary and sadly humane in the part; in a minor way, it’s one of his most telling performances for years. Memories of his part in 1991’s Hook add an extra intertextual piquancy.)
Even more? Little Mary, supposedly a dreadful failure, actually ran to packed houses for some 200 performances. And Barrie – a mustachioed scrawny five-foot-nothing of a man who looked decades older than his 44 years (he was horn on 9 May 1860) – bore no resemblance to the preposterously handsome Johnny Depp, the actor of whom I once heard a usually reserved English gentleman of mature years say, “Well. I’ve been solidly heterosexual for over fifty years, but I’d shag him.” (The fantasy scenes in which Barrie plays the swaggering pirate captain carry an amusing intertextual tang from the recent Pirates of the Caribbean.)
Neurotic creativity
Why these particular infidelities to the historical record? Partly, one suspects, to make Barrie’s intense interest in the family seem less creepy than it did to many witnesses in real life: with Sylvia a pluckily struggling widow, he can plausibly say to himself and others that he is being a gallant champion to her and a robust father substitute to the lads rather than pitifully childish or frankly paedophile. Partly, as well, to give a nice, weepy payoff, and a decorous one to boot, since Sylvia’s demise is represented by her getting up from her invalid’s chair and walking into the Neverland of the private Peter Pan show: a pre-Raphaelite Madonna drifting into a Maxfield Parrish otherworld. But mainly to give force to the film’s most essential relationship, that of Barrie the child-man with Peter the man-child.
There is not the faintest suggestion in the film that Barrie’s interest in the boys is erotic, whatever Edwardian London was saying; and the Llewelyn Davies boys seem to have agreed with this view. As Nico wrote to Andrew Birkin, author of J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: “I’m 200 per cent certain there was never a desire to kiss (other than the cheek!), though things went through his mind – often producing magic – which never go through the more ordinary minds of such as myself… All I can say for certain is that I… never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia; had he either of those leanings… I would have been aware. He was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan.’
This is very much the film’s line on Barrie. Like Alice in Wonderland the Peter Pan story has been subjected to some none-too subtle Freudian readings – though not in its own day. Viennese intellectuals had been able to study The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, but London had yet to learn how to prate in this new knowing manner. If Forster’s biopic might be thought of as Freudian, it is so in a very particular sense: gracefully swerving away from questions of perverse or arrested sexuality, it attends instead to another aspect of the great Freudian mythos, the part that deals with the neurolic Origins Of creativity.
A runt and a duffer
At least part of this myth has entered the fabric of modem folk wisdom: the belief that artists are, in the first instance, driven to create alternative worlds so as to compensate for some unendurable pain or inadequacy in their actual world: and that, by enticing others to participate in these worlds, the successful artist ultimately achieves through fantasy those goals – fame, beautiful lovers, money -previously attainable only in fantasy. And while Barrie may be largely neglected as an artist today, he was far and away the most financially successful British writer of his day.
He was loved and respected too, as Finding Neverland accurately shows. In the rapturous hoo hah that follows the first-night curtain of Peter Pan, wised up members of the audience point out Master Peter Llewelyn Davies as the hero’s original. Not so, says the boy, and points at Barrie as the true Peter Pan. Neither identification is quite right, as an earlier scene – founded squarely in reality – has let us guess. The truest original for Peter Pan was J.M. Barrie’s older brother David.
In Peter Pan itself, the Boy Who Never Grew Up does so by resisting puberty and adulthood, and remaining immortally youthful. In harsh reality, the only way not to grow up is to die; and that is what David Barrie did, on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. David Barrie, seven years James’ senior, was his family’s golden boy: not just brilliant at school but tall, handsome, athletic and utterly charming. James was not merely the runt – short, skinny and with a head too large for his body – but something of a duffer too. When David died in a skating accident their mother Margaret Ogilvy went into a state of depressive illness from which she never recovered.
Desperate to have his mother’s attention, the young James hit on the idea of turning himself into as convincing a replica of David as he could manage adopting his older brother’s trademark whistle, dressing in his clothes, mimicking his typical legs astride posture. Oddly enough, Margaret seems to have responded well to this futile attempt to usurp the dead brother’s place, though the illusion never soothed her for long: “Many a time,” Barrie later wrote, “she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, ‘My David’s dead!” or perhaps he remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man he was still a boy of thirteen.”
Aching with death
This was the introverted, necrophilia cradle of Barrie’s artistic imagination, and it is no wonder that his most deathless creation – remembered as the stuff of Christmas treats and innocent fun should ache with the threat of death. Even its single most emetic moment – when Peter asks the audience to clap if they believe in fairies – is plainly about the threat of imminent death and the panicky attempt to hold it at bay. On the play’s first night, Nina Bouciault – the actress who played the title role, and who had been so convinced that the audience would remain stony-faced and silent that she asked the orchestra to clap if no one else did – was so over whelmed by the tidal wave of applause that she burst into tears. In Finding Neverland the clap if-you-believe scene occurs not on the West End stage but in the Chamber performance mounted for the dying Sylvia. When Peter makes his plea, the first and most fervent applause – a fine, generous touch -comes from the Gorgon like grandmother, a woman who has previously shown herself to be about as whimsical as a Prussian General.
If Finding Neverland has any damaging weakness at its heart, it is the inability to concede that while Barrie might be a great myth-maker, he is far from being a great writer. (The same might be said of his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, here the one character with the guts to warn Barrie that people are calling him a pervert.) A less frequently recalled aspect of Freudian aesthetics is the one that gives us a possible yardstick to distinguish between the greats, the adequates and the also rans in art.
According to this line, if all art has its deepest roots in fantasy and wishfulness, the higher modes also attend minutely to the non fantastic world: thus to experience for a while the invented realm of, say, Dostoevsky is not pure escapism but a mode of temporary escape that brings us back to our own world with a deepened sense of its workings. For both artist and audience, then, art should be more than a dock leaf for the stinging nettles of life, and if Barrie’s remains a minor art, it is because he deals almost wholly with escape, not with return.
Finding Neverland is a fine film, and honours his talent handsomely, but it ducks the limitations of what Barrie could do with his gifts. Its sweet natured ending strongly suggests that young Peter Llewelyn Davies, having learned to trust his imagination, will grow up to be a writer like his ‘uncle’ lames. The actual Peter Llewelyn Davies grew up to be a publisher, always loathed his association with what he called “that terrible masterpiece”, and ultimately, on 5 April 1960, committed suicide by throwing himself under a tube train. In real life, the last word of the Peter Pan story went to death.
