Movie: Finding Neverland
Man, I've been busy, and now that I've started rehearsing for the next play even though the current one isn't finished, it's likely to be like that for a while.
A few nights ago, Strix and I watched Finding Neverland. Johnny Depp plays J M Barrie, the Scottish playwrite who wrote Peter Pan and - not incidentally - Dear Brutus, the play I'm in right now. Finding Neverland is supposed to be about the inspiration that lead Barrie to write Peter Pan. The beginning of the movie says, "Inspired by Actual Events," or something along those lines, and that's all you can really say, because it's not a true story.
In the movie, Barrie meets Sylvia Davies when she is already a widow, in 1903. In reality, he met them when the patriarch of the family, Arthur, was still alive, in 1897. Arthur didn't actually die until 1907. Peter Pan was already written by 1903, based somewhat on the children in the Davies family, so the fact that the movie had poor Slyvia a widow four years before her husband actually died was the screenwriter's way of making her more of a love interest for Barrie.
We put this movie at the top of our Netflix list because I was interested to learn more about Barrie since I'm in a play written by him right now. The character I play, Mr. Dearth, is semi-autobiographical, I think. Barrie's relationship with his wife, Mary Ansell, was, at least according to some, a cold and possibly even sexless marriage. Mr. Dearth is in a marriage with a wife that hates him, apparently for failing to measure up to some unspoken ideal that she had set up. Dearth is an artist, and his wife is a model, whereas Barrie was a playwrite, and his wife was an actress. Barrie and his wife were childless, a fact that he apparently regretted since he romanticized childhood so much in Peter Pan, and Dearth and his wife are likewise childless, a fact which he regrets but she does not. There are a good number of parallels.
Despite the movie's playing fast and loose with the facts, it was very entertaining to watch, and had excellent performances from Depp (of course), Kate Winslet (Sylvia Davies), and an incredibly cold and unlikable Radha Mitchell (Mary Ansell, Barrie's actress wife).
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