Steeped in melancholy, the strange story of JM Barrie, the Victorian who wrote Peter Pan, has the makings of a marvelous tale and one doozy of a case history. Born in Scotland in 1860, Barrie was a playwright and novelist who, after meeting a family stuffed with young boys, created in 1904 a classic of children's literature. In the years since, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has been revisited numerous times, as in the splendid 1952 Disney animation, and has become an emblem for everlasting youth, both healthy and less so.
Mary Martin soared as Peter Pan; Michael Jackson crashed. As Barrie in Finding Neverland, a handsome-looking film about the writer and his unripe inspirations, the actor Johnny Depp neither soars nor crashes, but moseys forward with vague purpose and actorly restraint. Based on the play by Allan Knee, The Man Who Was Peter Pan, and directed by Marc Forster, the film mainly concerns the period during which Barrie met and befriended Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her brood of boys. Adrift in a marriage with a former actress (Radha Mitchell) with whom he enjoyed neither friendship nor bedroom intimacy, Barrie took to the Davies family like a famished man.
PHOTO: AP
What began as play-dates in the park soon evolved into a grand passion.
The geography of that passion remains inexact. Barrie loved the boys and some of the boys loved him, and it was a relationship that provided giggles and gossip. The idea that a grown man would be smitten by children sounds alarming to contemporary ears. But well-to-do Victorians shrouded their progeny in sentimentality (the poor dispatched theirs to factories and fields) and there exists no evidence that Barrie's interest in the boys was anything other than chastely romantic. At the same time, his attentions were undeniably instrumental. The boys inspired Barrie to create his greatest, most lasting work and he stayed closely involved in their lives until death. He lavished them with costly gifts and smothered them with affection, notice that occasionally provoked the irritation of the Davies paterfamilias, Arthur.
Arthur doesn't put in an appearance in Finding Neverland, probably because having a grumbling father and husband on the scene would draw uncomfortable attention to Barrie's fixation. Sylvia is already widowed in David Magee's screenplay and is more the obvious focus of the writer's attention than her children. The beautiful, bountiful widow, with her tousled hair and impeccable manners, quickly becomes an ideal substitute wife for Barrie. She raises kids he loves but doesn't have to live with, and never insists he perform any of the usual husbandly duties. The filmmakers work hard to idealize the relationship and the two actors exchange suitably noble looks even when Winslet's decolletage threatens to play peek-a-boo. It's all terribly polite, not a little dull and remote.
The problem isn't the liberties the filmmakers take with reality, but that this isn't an engaging bowdlerization. Barrie and Sylvia don't have to tussle like Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball, Forster's last feature, but it would have been nice if they trembled once or twice. Depp and Winslet are pleasant to watch, as are the actors who play the Davies boys, but they haven't been pushed to their limits. Although these two adults are surely up to pantomiming repression, Forster doesn't direct them to show what their characters cannot say. Unlike Daniel Day-Lewis's frustrated lover in Martin Scorsese's Age of Innocence, similarly a prisoner of his time, Barrie doesn't nuzzle Sylvia's wrist or breathe in her perfume. The glaze on his face never cracks.
In reality, Barrie was homely, small in stature and might have been impotent or just uninterested in sex. He met the five (not four, as in the film) Davies boys long before their father's death. Arthur died in 1907, after Peter Pan was mounted on the London stage, and Sylvia followed him to the grave three years later. Barrie's devotion to the children was such that he might have altered Sylvia's will so that he could take stewardship of the boys. He did, and the tragedies continued: one son was killed during World War I, another was an apparent suicide. Years after Barrie died, the 63-year-old Peter, yet another son and another suicide, threw himself under a train, having long hated his connection with his namesake. For this man who did grow up, Peter Pan was, as he called it, a "terrible masterpiece."
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS