Finding Neverland

Herald rating: * * * *

It is 1903 and J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp), an emerging Scottish playwright at the age of 43, watches his latest production flop. The theatre boss (Dustin Hoffman) is not pleased: he needs bums on seats.

Hiding out in Kensington Gardens, a despondent Barrie chances on the Llewelyn Davies family: Sylvia, the mother (Kate Winslet), and her boys Peter, George, Jack and Michael (Freddie Highmore, Nick Roud, Joe Prospero, Luke Spill).

Barrie becomes friendly with the family, obsessing about Sylvia, comparing/contrasting her sons' lives with his unhappy childhood. He withdraws from his home life, only months after his marriage to Mary (Radha Mitchell).

At the Davies' home Sylvia's mother is not impressed. She is Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie), widow of novelist George du Maurier, used to literary sophistication, not impressed by a middle-aged man playing with her grandsons.

If all this sounds precariously close to a court case on the other side of the world, involving a middle-aged celebrity who likes the company of small boys, and in which the word Neverland is also featuring ... well.

Inspired by the lads running around in the park and at home, Barrie comes up with a play about fairies, pirates, flying children and a boy called Peter who will never grow up.

As he was with Pirates of the Caribbean, inspired then and now by his daughter's love of fairytales, Depp emerges from his Provencal hideaway to engage us with a remarkable performance. Gentle, introverted, his Barrie is a remarkable stretch from the Keith Richards-inspired loucheness of Captain Jack Sparrow or his more serious roles.

Cute, but Finding Neverland shrinks from some of the deeper themes and questions raised in Peter Pan and that other case.

That impression is reinforced in director Marc Forster's commentary on the disk. "Barrie wasn't a paedophile," he says, "he was an asexual man." His writer, David Magee, and producer, Richard N Gladstein, agree. Hmmm. There's a brief production overview, a sappy set of shots from assorted red carpets, and three rightfully deleted scenes.

* DVD, Video rental June 15