Peter Pan
Does the world need another "Peter Pan"? Especially after Mary Martin and Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg and pop psychology and endless other permutations on J. M. Barrie's 1904 play have dinned the tale of the forever-boy into our heads?
Upon viewing the rococo new movie version from Australian director P. J. Hogan ("Muriel's Wedding," "My Best Friend's Wedding"), the answer is a qualified yes. Here's a "Pan" that roots its sensibilities in the Edwardian ardor of Barrie's quaint, very smart original; the movie has the lantern glow of such recent period kiddie-classic adaptations as 1993's "The Secret Garden" and 1995's "A Little Princess."
It also has in the young British actress Rachel Hurd-Wood a Wendy for the ages -- an adolescent girl sailing between larkish youth and yearning adulthood with a growing sense of the shoals underlying both. The movie's not for the toddler crowd: Hogan has amped up both the violence and the tale's mossy early-Freudian subtext with results that are both enchanting and creepy. But at least he's trying something different.
Throw in Ludivine Sagnier of "Swimming Pool" as a silent but shamelessly mugging Tinker Bell, special effects that have the gilt innocence of a Victorian picture book, and mermaids out of an Edward Gorey drawing and you have a movie with very specific hothouse charms. All "Peter Pan" lacks is a Peter Pan with any discernible personality, no matter that Jeremy Sumpter is the first actual, genetic boy to play the role on film. Since the actor falls squarely into the Aaron Carter mall-god camp, though, the 'tweeners this adaptation is aimed at may not care.
Hewing closely to the original story line, "Peter Pan" right away establishes an air of turn-of-the-century magic realism. Wendy has been dazzling brothers John (Harry Newell) and Michael (Freddie Popplewell) with bedtime tales of Neverland, to the consternation of her fussy businessman father (Jason Isaacs), dreamily beautiful mother (Olivia Williams), and ramrod aunt (Lynn Redgrave). Nor are the girl's teachers amused by Wendy's doodle of a costumed boy hovering over her bed. All of which means nothing when Peter arrives to take the three children away to Neverland via the usual route, here imagined as a cotton-candy planetarium tour.
You know the rest: lost boys (more honestly funny than the gang from "Hook"), Indians (sweetly un-PC), the ticking crocodile (computer animated and fearsome), and Captain James Hook, played by Isaacs as a lethal, scary, sexy beast with no compunction about shooting laggardly crew members. The scenes between Peter and Wendy are charged with the pastel eroticism of kids meeting at a junior-high prom, but when Wendy and Hook lock eyes and the movie holds its breath, you know you're getting into seriously weird territory.
Still, "Peter Pan" is good enough that I wished that it were better -- that the final scenes didn't have the blunt obviousness of a men's self-help circle, and that Sumpter wasn't so healthy and happy and dull. The film's ambition and nerve are present whenever Hurd-Wood is on-screen, capturing the idealistic rapture of a girl standing at the edge of the hormonal abyss.
Sagnier, for her part, practically channels Harpo Marx as Tink, but when the awful moment comes and a grieving Peter leads the children of the world in an invocation of belief (no hand claps this time, only prayers), the hairs on the back of your neck may stand up. He's weeping for us grown-ups, of course, as well as for Tinker Bell.
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