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Peter PanStarring |
IN SHORT: nnn. [Rated . minutes]
Put Disney out of your brain. That's harder to do than it sounds but, if you can't reset before you begin, there will be moments in this adaptation of Peter Pan that will throw you.
Captain Hook carries a sword and a brace of pistols. He likes using them. He doesn't seem all that concerned when he blows away members of his crew. The Captain does not stomach stupidity.
Then there is Peter Pan, the boy ever on the edge of puberty, who refuses to grow up. He and pals the Lost Boys like to play pirates and indians. Peter's best pal is a fairie, little flying pixies of whom there are lots, called [Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier)] and she seems to be extraordinarily jealous of the girl Wendy Darling () that Peter has been espying during his trips to the Outside World city of London. Wendy's father, George Darling () works at the bank but hasn't done much to work his way up the corporate ladder. Mom () is devoted to her husband and children but Aunt Millicent (Lynn Redgrave) knows the ways of high society and is determined to give George the necessary pushes in the right direction. George is willing but, to be honest, completely incompetent at ladder climbing.
The London we see is as real as a fantasy city can be. Its look is both realistic and yet somewhat unreal, almost as if we were looking at subtle animation (as opposed to movie models with actors technically dropped in portions of the "set"). The world, the age of the novels written by JM Barrie is that twilight of the nineteenth century -- an Edwardian London lit by candles and gas lamps instead of electricity, vital communications carried by messenger in a time before telephone wires have crisscrossed the city, women and men growing into a specified order and place. Only in childhood can a girl play at manly occupations like pirate or fighter and Wendy Darling, as she is informed by her Aunt Millicent, is about to begin her training in the ways of becoming a high society woman. She is thirteen and her childhood is about to end. That means no more play time. No imaginary worlds to create in the play time she shares with brothers Michael and John, a time filled with pirate and indians and great battles to save civilization.
Thus Neverland, in which all the games of childhood become reality. Jung's inner child runs rampant in this place, where Wendy and her perfect match Peter will have the opportunity to rule the roost as Mom and Dad. It is not the marriage that her parents will eventually arrange for her but rather Wendy's ideal match in a world where she does not have to repress her independent streak (or what would come to be called, in eighty or ninety years, her feminist tendency. It is a world where she is happiest.
We don't see a lot of Aunt Millicent (Lynn Redgrave ), though buried in the screenplay is the reason for that grownup's unhappiness, something that has had a greater effect on Wendy than the apparent happiness of her parent's marriage. Aunt Millicent is also the pushy relation that prods and inadvertantly emasculates Wendy's father. Wendy needn't worry about that because Millicent will soon be in charge of her life. Wendy will need her own room (she had shared a large space with both brothers and a dog called Nanna). She will need to be away from the boys; to cease playing with them in the reckless ways that boys do.
But before order can be imposed, there will be rebellion and joyous chaos. Into Wendy's life flies the perfect boy, Peter, masculine but beautiful in a way that borders on feminine; filled with energy and doer of good things in a never ending battle against the evil pirate captain James Hook, whose ship the Jolly Roger is stuck in the seas near Neverland. Even before they meet, Peter's impulsiveness works against him. Nana senses the intruder and traps his shadow in a drawer. Tinkerbell can't rescue half her friend and, eventually, she will be trapped even as the shadow and Peter are reunited thanks to Wendy's skilled use of a needle and thread. When offered the chance to fly away, Wendy asks if her brothers can come along. Told yes, after some obvious surprise and shock, a sprinkle of fairie dust from a less than thrilled Tinkerbell sends the foursome out into the night sky. Up up and away beyond the orbits of planets not even seen with a telescope. Linking hand to ankles in a human chain, Peter tells his new friends not to let go and whosh! Next stop Neverland where Peter and his Lost Boys - all runaways as Wendy and Michael and John now are - engage in real life battle with Princess Tiger Lilly and her Indians and are always on guard for the murderous pirates of the Jolly Roger, led by Captain James Hook () and mislaid by Hook's First Mate, Smee ().
It's a neverending battle in a neverending story but the introduction of a feminine element to the context throws everything out of whack. While Hook does his pirate thing, holding Wendy and her brothers hostage and threatening them to lure Peter into battle, the grownup also realizes that any attraction between the near-teenagers will trigger Peter's genetics and force him to grow up. Once the boy Peter is gone, the man Hook will have won. He will have forced the destruction of freewheeling childhood...
and oh how psychoshrinks like Freud and Jung had fun with this stuff in the years just after Barrie penned his classic. For grownups that haven't had exposure to anything more than the television productions (either Disney or the adaptations of [Barrie's] stage play) the Pan on the big screen is a helluva lot more action packed than would be fit for any five year old to see. Barrie wrote for the
On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Ten Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Peter Pan, he would have paid . . .
$x
kicker
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