Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

I don’t know a great deal about the life of J. M. Barrie, but I do know enough to be fairly confident that Finding Neverland is quite heavily fictionalised. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it – I suspect a good deal more that if it had been faithful to the facts. Although it didn’t actually ignore the problems with his marriage and the impact of his brother’s death, it didn’t really ask you to think too deeply about his relationships with other people. He came across in the film as perhaps somewhat awkward, but not much more than that. As I said, I don’t really know much about his life, but I gather it is generally felt that the death of his brother was very damaging to his emotional growth.

The Barrie of the film, however, was a totally engaging character, for all his occasional naivetes. I loved Johnny Depp’s performance, and also that of the boy who played Peter. At times it was a bit overly sentimental, but not excessively so.

The only thing that I was a bit bothered by was the suggestion that imagination needs to equate to belief. I got the sense of a subtext was that unless you can actually believe the things you make up, then your imagination is somehow inadequate. But surely something can be wonderful and magical and life-enriching even if you know that it is not actually true. You don’t have to actually believe in something to completely lose yourself in it … do you?