The new $100 million filming of "Peter Pan," directed by P.J. Hogan for Universal Pictures, bills itself as "the timeless story as you've never seen it before." Much of it looks very familiar, however. Sure, there are some new special effects that make the children's flight to Neverland look as if they are flying through the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland, and the fight scenes between Peter and Hook as if choreographed from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." But the film is basically a live-action version of the 1953 Disney animated classic.
The film takes place in early twentieth-century London, the same place and period where James Matthew Barrie originally wrote the story, and its Peter is the same flamboyant sylph who has been charming adults and children for more than a century. Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are both played by the same actor, Jason Isaacs, which is how it was done in the original productions.
And yet something is different in this new version, for the children around Peter--the Darling siblings and the sorry band of Lost Boys--seem altered. Barrie always had a pronounced distaste for adulthood and a belief in the innocence of children. But he wasn't a complete sentimentalist, and the children's innocence showed itself in their comic hedonism. Indeed, that's what provided Barrie with the wit that makes reading "Peter Pan" a delight and prevents it from being merely a mawkish treatise on the folly of maturity. In this film, Hallmark sentimentality replaces the humor, and a curious knowingness replaces the unselfconsciousness that used to make the story run.
That's a pity, really, because innocence is what "Peter Pan" is all about. The character was created by a man fixated on arresting time and returning to the idylls of childhood. It was an obsession that started before Barrie even grew up. He was the seventh surviving child in a family of eight, born in 1860 to David Barrie, a handloom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvy in the Scottish village of Kirriemuir.
His mother had great educational ambitions for her children. She was a religious woman who in her youth had belonged to an austere splinter group of the Presbyterian Church known as the Auld Lichts (old lights), and her greatest desire was that her sons become ministers. Her star child was her middle son, David, who showed tremendous academic promise. But in 1866 when he was thirteen, David died in a skating accident. Margaret Ogilvy's face became, in J.M's words, "soft" and "wet" in sadness, and she started her lifelong obsessive mourning for David.
Six-year-old J.M. could see that in her mind's eye, David was frozen in glorious youth, and he ached to become his surrogate. David was the specter that could unshroud his mother's happiness, and so the living boy dressed up for her in the dead boy's clothes--whistling his whistle, telling her jokes and stories, and trying to recreate for her the stories of her own childhood she would tell. "If I live to a time when . . . the past comes sweeping back like shades of night over the bare road of the present, it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see but hers," he wrote. "Such a grip has her memory of her girlhood had upon me since I was six."
DESPITE HIS BETTER INTENTIONS, Barrie grew up, and despite his mother's contrary desires, moved to London and became a very successful writer as a young adult. He loved telling stories and writing stories, and he was a prodigious worker, producing reams of articles, books, and plays. By the time he was thirty-two he was something of a literary celebrity. All the prestigious British publications were printing his articles, and he had had three plays performed and six books published, most of which were critical and commercial successes in England and overseas.
But in several ways Barrie remained a child. His high forehead, bulging eyes, and broom moustache gave him a thoughtful countenance, but his body was small, about five feet tall. His books and plays made him very wealthy, but he never cared for money, and didn't notice when his manager misappropriated thousands of pounds or large checks weren't cashed. Relations with the opposite sex filled him with trepidation. Throughout his life young pretty women, very often the actresses of his plays, mesmerized him, but he agonized that his height and callowness rendered him invisible to them. Though he married actress Mary Ansell in 1894, he thought marriage a ghastly prison, and, rumored to be impotent, he invested no energy in it.
Instead he retreated into the world of youth that he loved so much, both in his professional work and in his private life. In 1897 while taking a walk through Kensington Gardens with his large St. Bernard dog, Porthos, he met the cherubic muses who would later inspire "Peter Pan." It was mutual attraction from the first. The five-year-old George, four-year-old Jack, baby Peter, and later Michael and Nico Llewellyn Davies, were the quintessential children: pint-sized, angel-faced keepers of the youth crypt.
And for the boys, Barrie was an ultimate playmate. As Andrew Birkin notes in "J.M Barrie and the Lost Boys," Barrie "could wiggle his ears and perform magic feats with his eyebrows . . . Singularly well informed on the subject of cricket, fairies, murders, pirates, hangings, desert islands, . . . he was old, but not grown up."
BARRIE INSINUATED HIMSELF into the Llewellyn Davies family, to the consternation of the boys' father, Arthur, a barrister, who didn't know what to do with this strange little man who hung around his house for longer than was polite and had a disconcertingly idolizing friendship with his wife, Sylvia. But Barrie was happily marooned on an oasis of youth. In 1900 he published "Tommy and Grizel," an autobiographical novel about a writer in London who remains a boy at heart with disastrous consequences for his romantic involvements. In 1902 he published "The Little White Bird," about a writer, Captain W., who develops a close friendship with a young boy, David, a thinly disguised account of Barrie's relationship with George Llewellyn. It is here that Peter Pan first appears, as one of the characters in a story that the Captain tells David.
In his original incarnation, Peter Pan was a "betwixt-and-between," not a bird, not a human, but a strange boy creature who escaped his mother when he was seven days old by flying out the window. He wandered around Kensington Gardens, shunned by all the living things, scaring the birds and the fairies, just wanting his mother to blow his nose but not knowing that that was what he wanted. He is torn between returning to his mother's love and the freedom of the garden. Eventually he becomes the garden's gravedigger, burying the children who perished because they remained there after lock-out time.
But Peter Pan was developing a life beyond that of the peculiar gravedigger. In a 1901 holiday in Surrey, Barrie and the Davies boys, with the help of Porthos the dog who wore a tiger's mask, play-acted stories of pirates and redskins and walking the plank. Barrie photographed the exploits and self-published the shots in a book called "The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island." Back in London, when walking in Kensington Gardens, parents who had read "The Little White Bird" would besiege Barrie with questions about fairies and Peter Pan, and Barrie started working on the story. In his tongue-in-cheek introduction, Barrie attributes authorship to the five boys and says he "rubbed the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks create a flame," and created Peter and his adventures in Neverland.
PETER PAN is the story of Wendy (a name Barrie invented, to the dismay of thousands of girls subsequently given the name), Michael, and John Darling, who are lured out of the nursery window by Peter Pan, the boy who doesn't want to grow up. Flying away to Neverland, Wendy becomes mother to Peter's Lost Boys--boys who fell out of the perambulators when their nannies weren't looking. The dastardly Captain Hook, so-called because of the hook he used to replace his arm after Peter cut it off and threw it to the crocodile, stalks them all. The crocodile, who has swallowed a ticking clock that heralds his arrival wherever he goes, in turn stalks Hook, and there are lots of fabulous sword fights, daring rescues of Indian princesses, communions with mermaids and fairies, before the Darlings decide that it is time to fly back to the nursery.
The play opened in London in 1904. The production was lavish, with its flying children, flickering fairies, and enchanting animals. Audiences loved it, and the play was revived for season after season. In 1906 Barrie republished the Peter Pan chapters in "The Little White Bird" as "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens," and in 1908, there was a solo performance of Barrie's addendum, "When Wendy Grew Up, an Afterthought," a very short play in which Wendy's daughter Jane flies away with Peter Pan for spring cleaning. Barrie published his novelized version of the story, "Peter and Wendy," in 1911.
In the ensuing years, the story of Peter Pan was read, performed, and filmed countless times. Tragedy after tragedy, however, shattered the innocence of the family that gave birth to Peter Pan. Arthur died of cancer in 1907, Sylvia in 1910 (at which point Barrie adopted the boys), George in action on the front in 1915, Michael in a possible suicide drowning in 1921, and Pan's namesake Peter, who called the play "that terrible masterpiece," stepped in front of an oncoming train in 1960.
The new film version is an attempt to dress Barrie's vision in newer, more expensive clothes. Hogan and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg add a character to the story, Aunt Millicent (Lynn Redgrave), a family matriarch who wants to ensure that the Darlings will move upwards out of the middle-class quagmire. She wants to steer the tyrannical, socially inept Mr. Darling to success at the bank ("Wit is very fashionable at the moment," she says as she instructs him on making small talk), and--horror of horrors--remove Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) from the nursery so that she can start becoming a young lady.
THAT NIGHT, of course, Peter Pan (Jeremy Sumpter) and Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier) arrive in the nursery and inveigle the children to fly back with them to Neverland. There they battle the lasciviously charming Hook and his hideous pirates twice--the first time on the turrets and landings of Hook's dark stone castle, which is replete with mechanical gates that lower into a murky moat where the ticking crocodile waits patiently, and the second time onboard the Jolly Roger pirate ship. During the second fight, Pan gets the energy to finish off Hook after Wendy kisses him and sends his powers soaring.
Neverland in this film is a flashy place--green and lush, dark and foreboding, happy and giddy. There are fairies that act like illuminated human humming birds, mermaids that look like large piscean silver fetuses, and a weather system that can see four seasons in one day.
Peter Pan is the lord of this place. The original was obnoxiously cocky, so enamored with himself and pleased with his cunning that he sang his own praises all the time. He would often almost ruin his plans by bursting into applause for himself, and, because his world was really only big enough for him, he forgot who people were all the time. Though the film gestures at this cockiness--Peter says, "Oh, the cleverness of me!" once and, as they are flying, asks John who he is--Sumpter is more puckish than conceited.
SAGNIER IS FABULOUS as Tinkerbell and quite possibly the best part of this film. She doesn't talk, she buzzes, mugging for the camera and pulling faces that are so exaggerated and funny that playground children would envy them. "Tink was not all bad . . . sometimes she was all good. Fairies . . . being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time," says the narrator, in a line from the original. But this Tink is--luckily for the audience--mainly bad. She is tremendously loyal to Peter, but she hates Wendy and is furious at Peter for liking Wendy, so she concocts little fairy plans to get Wendy out of Neverland.
But this film is missing Barrie's ironic humor. In Barrie's original, for example, Nana the dog is the sensible one at the Darling house while Mr. Darling is the fool who could not tie his tie and feels so remorseful about his part in the children's flying away that he goes to live in the dog kennel. "In the bitterness of his remorse he swore that he would never leave the kennel until his children came back," Barrie writes. "Of course, this was a pity; but whatever Mr. Darling did he had to in excess; otherwise he soon gave up doing it."
Similarly, when the original Wendy becomes a mother to the Lost Boys, she feigns adult seriousness and propriety but is actually so childishly delighted that she is given a chance to mother them--even in a place where she needs to make rules about not guzzling imaginary tea too loudly--that it supersedes any seriousness. "She would fling up her arms and exclaim, 'Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied.' Her face beamed when she exclaimed this."
The film neglects a lot of these comic possibilities. And the actors playing the Lost Boys and the Darling siblings can't quite manage the degree of ingenuousness necessary for the roles to work. The script's mistrust of anything like guilelessness doesn't help. There are two superfluous kisses for example: one as the redskin princess Tiger Lily kisses John Darling after she is rescued, and John blushes, and the other, near the end, as Wendy kisses Peter and empowers him to fly high and defeat Hook. Barrie managed to desexualize kisses by making them thimbles, acorns, and buttons. Here they are contrived to add a soupçon of knowingness that hails maturity, the very opposite of Peter Pan. In "Peter and Wendy" and "Peter Pan," Wendy's relationship with Peter hovers at the edge of oedipal ambiguity. He thinks of her as his mother, but she wants more than that although she does think of him as the father of the house. Wendy, however, was a little girl always confused by Peter, and in making her knowing, the filmmaker axes the story.
BUT PERHAPS THE FILM is only accounting for how different children are today. They're no longer pre-teen exemplars of vernal bloom. Instead they are the zero-to-ten-age-bracket for advertisers to target, and Neverland is no longer a dreamy island of "coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs," but a toy store, where children are lured by advertisers to spend their parents' money on Playstations and Swan Lake Barbie dolls.
And the Peter Pans of today are not aeriform boys who still have all their baby teeth but grotesque adults with none of the flight but all of the stunted growth. The film is dedicated to one--Dodi Fayed, the final paramour of Princess Diana, who was a nouveau riche eternal child living a giddy and carefree life where he spent lavishly but didn't pay his bills. Another, faded pop star Michael Jackson, who is so dedicated to being Peter Pan that his ranch is called Neverland, trails weird scandals wherever he goes.
Still, this splashy and extravagant production is testament to the fact that the legend of Peter Pan is not going to fade. He remains as Barrie created him, a character who might change with time, but is never changed by time.
Gaby Wenig is a writer in Los Angeles.