It's completely unfair that I've walked out of three movies in a row cheerfully satisfied. I'm going to start thinking I like movies, and then I'm bound for disappointment.
Disclaimer: I love Peter Pan. That is to say, I love J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and I walked into this movie with the sort of dread and trepidation that most of my friends brought to The Lord of the Rings.
And from the opening screen--"All children grow up. Except one."--to the point where a low, slow ticking is heard from the upper left hand corner of the theatre, I couldn't stop smiling.
When the ticking started is when I stopped smiling and started to chuckle low in my throat. Oh, it's sweet to see this done well.
There are silly bits, and playful bits, and I think I caught one very short Froud homage, and the pacing seems a bit off here and there.
But this is Peter Pan. For one thing, it remembers what is to me the most important fact about the book: the choice that lies behind the story of Peter Pan is that you cannot have everything you want. You have to choose the hill you wanna die on. And it doesn't matter what hill that is: there is no right or wrong answer. Only the answer that is right for you.
Jeremy Sumpter, the young actor playing Peter Pan, is rawly sensual, fey, wicked, and charismatic. Utterly Peter. The chemistry between him and Wendy is positively electric. And oh, his smile. Rachel Hurd-Wood is gorgeously spunky and wise as Wendy: she reminds me of itty bitty baby Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth with the sweetness and the fierce.
And Jason Isaacs. I cannot say enough about Jason Isaacs. Except, Jason Isaacs in Regency pirate duds. Huminah. *g* He's perfect as Hook and as Mr. Darling. Hook is sympathetic, complex, obsessed, fascinated, dark, bright, manipulative, shining--and so obviously the dark half of Peter Pan that the movie doesn't even have to resort to storytelling tricks to point it out.
I'm still grinning. How often do you walk out of a movie based on one of your favourite books just shimmering with fairy-dust?
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I suspect though that it'll still come in a distant second to my favorite rendition of the story, which is Mabou Mine's "Peter & Wendy", a brilliant play (it won an OBIE in 1997) done with bunraku-style puppets, only one actress/narrator, and perfect Celtic music. There's a decent review of it here. It really captured the whole Peter Pan thing in a way that worked for both children and adults.
I think one of the things that trips theatrical productions of Pan is trying to make the story too real--it's a fairy-tail, a series of symbols and dreams, a child's story. It needs fairy-tale logic, and trying to give it real-life logic is not so effective.
JM Barre added Hook late in the writing of the story, when someone told him he needed a villain in his piece. He thought he HAD written a villian -- Peter Pan.
I watched this movie with that in mind, and felt I could see that, which I loved. . .
In the last scene, where Peter's saying goodbye to Wendy, and his face just sort of blanks out -- do you think he really had any memory of who Wendy even WAS by the time he flew off?
Or at least, if he's not a *villain,* he's an antagonist. It's Wendy's story, after all--Wendy's the one who grows and changes.
And no, I don't think he remembers. That's the hill he is going to die on.
Wow.
I read the book last month in anticipation.
It manages to be faithful to the spirit of the book while changing enough plotpoints that it wasn't directly predictable.
The Hook/Pan parallelism that Hook brings up during the final fight was brilliant, though I am concerned that... [trying to figure out how to write this without spoiling ending for others] ...what differentiates children from grownups is love; Hook has an awareness of what he lacks, and giving Peter any hint of that could change the character, and part of his strength and threat is his unchanging nature.
For Peter to change, he'd have to remember. Or have had to accept Wendy's challenge to grow up. I don't see Peter's decision to remain a child as necessarily a failure, either, although that's the conventional reading.
I love in this version that it's very clear that Wendy's not ready to become an adult, really, until she's had the adventures she dreams about, and she can make that decision knowing what she's gaining and what she's giving up. It's not the too-frequent simplification--and now you must put childish things away and become a young lady. Why? Because it is Right and Proper.
This shows why you might want to grow up. And why you might choose not to. And neatly avoids the value judgement.
[Then again, as Hook was going through his case of hooks, trying on the various models, I started wondering which one was the g-spotter. 8D ]