I was hesitant about this movie at first, somewhat based on the previews, which implied more of a focus on the alleged improprieties of J.M. Barrie and the "lost boys," but I've yet to see a movie with Johnny Depp in in that didn't win me over. (Is there a better actor with an amazing talent for picking good scripts?) And this movie is indeed better than its trailers, with excellent performances not only from the four leads (Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, and Dustin Hoffman), but also from the children who play the boys--especially the boy who plays Peter, who has to get across some very complicated emotions.

What struck me most about the movie is how much it is about the creation of the play, "Peter Pan," in a strange case of a movie's title actually having something to do with its content. I thought it did a good job of showing how writers incorporate their daily life into their writing, even when the story is fanciful and fantastic. In this movie, the play itself is the main character, and it isn't until you get to the end of the movie that you realize this. While this is a story about Barrie, it's not really his autobiography, in a sense that you meet him in media res, where he's already become famous, and you have no idea how he got to that spot. And as much as it focuses on the lost boys, it also doesn't explore the after-effects of the play or Barrie's friendship with them.

What I was disappointed by it was that it didn't do more exploration of the creative process, but then that would have been a documentary, and not a feature film. For that further exploration, I likely need to get a copy of Andrew Birkin's J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys. In particular, I'm interested in the timing between Peter's first appearance in print (in Barrie's strangely wonderful novel, The Little White Bird, one of my favorite books, which you can read online) and how that character then appeared in Barrie's subsequent novels and plays (and that being an assumption that the play didn't precede that novel).

It may be that this movie will bring more attention to Barrie, who's been virtually forgotten except for Peter Pan (and, as we discussed after the movie, just how many people would have been able to name the author of Peter Pan?). Like another of my favorite writers, James Branch Cabell, until this movie, Barrie seemed destined to be just an answer to a brown question in Trival Pursuit. But, in his time, he was considered as great a playwright as George Bernard Shaw. I'm, at least, interested in delving deeper, and I suspect that others will be, too.