Number 481 on the top 1000 films of all time is Marc Foster's biopic fantasy drama 'Finding Neverland.'
Finding Neverland tells the true-life story of Scottish children's author JM Barrie (Johnny Depp.) After his latest play flops, he is desperately looking for a new idea. This is when he meets widow and single mother Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) - she and her children serve as the inspiration for Barrie's most famous story: Peter Pan. Julie Christie and Dustin Hoffman co-star.
Finding Neverland started slowly, but once it got going it became a touching and surprising story about connection and childhood innocence. I say surprising, because, as a general rule, I'm generally not interested in biopics/period dramas. Neither am I much interested in Peter Pan. I don't know anything of the story outside of the Disney cartoon.
Yet that didn't matter with the ever-impressive Johnny Depp at the helm. Having become better known as a character actor with eccentric and off-beat roles, it was refreshing to see him in one of his most human roles. I'm not sure how much of Finding Neverland was fact and how much was fiction, but it did portray Barrie as a wholly complicated and interesting character. It's no surprise that Depp was Oscar-nominated for the role.
As for Kate Winslet, she was good but I felt that in her early career, she was often typecast as an upper-class aristocratic woman whether that is Sense and Sensibility or Hamlet. True, she does it well and she did well opposite Depp, but it did feel like Llewelyn Davies was just another similar character in a very long list.
Although it tells a story of fantasy and escape with multiple sets and like a pirate's ship or a desert, Marc Foster always kept things firmly grounded in the real by partly how Barrie was inspired by the people or events around him basing Peter Pan on Sylvia's son Peter, Freddy Highmore in an early role.
Overall, I enjoyed Finding Neverland. I wasn't sure whether I would, but it pleasantly surprised me. Now say it with me...I do...I do... I do believe in fairies.
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