“Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed…”

That is the description J.M. Barrie gives of the Neverland in the 1911 novelization of his stageplay “Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.” It is not described as a huge island of grey cliffs and yellow long grass, with not a landmark insight. But that is what Disney, and director David Lowery, believes the Neverland to be.
There are mermaids, certainly and pirates, too, but they are as bland and uninteresting as everything else in Disney’s latest attempt at bringing about some ounce of good-will by resurrecting one of its beloved features with cobbled together additions and subtractions.
The subtractions are not surprising, and mostly come from the film drawing most of its ink from the 1950s Disney flick rather than the original play or novel: There is no fairy dust (it is instead the very mid-century “pixie dust”), the Lost Boys do not build a house around Wendy (nor indeed do they shoot her) and Tinker Bell is not poisoned when she drinks Peter’s medicine to save his life.
These changes, however, are the merest peccadilloes, and are come to be expected in adaptations. But what is not so easy to excuse is the change of feeling when compared to the source. Take Peter himself.
In Barrie’s world, Peter is a boy of both indeterminate age and physicality, who ran away the day he was born. At certain moments he seems to be a day old, while in others he is nearer to a toddler or a boy of eight. His main quality is his cockiness and his forgetfulness, however he is of frightfully good form.
The Peter (Alexander Molony) of “Peter Pan & Wendy,” lacks all of these traits, and seems all together too of the world and too of his age (indeed, he is one who can, and nearly does, die). This Peter learns lessons and has memories, something at odds with who Peter is at his core, and it feels wrong and unearned. And the worst part is that he is absent for so much of the run-time, so that it is a wonder that such a Peter whose only quality is his ability to hit his mark got first billing.
The film disappoints, too, in its depiction of Tiger Lily. The film apparently does not see the flaws of having the real Cree tribe on display in a fantasy island, and does not. However, there is undeniable power in the scene where Peter loses his ability to fly (through means not interesting enough to describe) and is ridden into battle by Tiger Lily, and it is one of only a few moments (more on those anon) that make this Peter Pan story feel like it was worth telling.
The film has other blind spots which it reveals. The performance by Ever Anderson as Wendy is admirable, however she is given frightfully dull and uninteresting material. In trying to create a more complex woman, they have flattened Miss Moira Angela Darling considerably, turning her into a wet-rag (a flaw also of the 1950s film), so that one might wonder why she followed Peter to the Neverland to begin with. These qualities exist to a certain extent within the original play and novel (such as her not wanting to be called a squaw or finding Michael’s killing of a pirate awful) however they are motivated by the Neverland as playground for a role she later jumps into.
The film attempts to give Wendy a different motivation, however nothing quite sticks the landing, and so the whole of the film falls apart. The entire mother angle, so central to Peter Pan that Barrie’s original sub-title for the play was “The Boy Who Hated Mothers” is removed almost entirely, replaced with an under-current of friendship which is less interesting but more marketable.
The same whiting out can be said to have happened to the nonconformist pirate Smee, who in the play and novel spends the chief part of his day tickling his foes with his cutlass (which he calls “Johnny Corkscrew” because he wriggles it into his foes bellies) and then wiping it off with the same towel he uses to wipe his spectacles, or if not doing that then sewing on the deck of the Jolly Roger.
However, the Smee of “Peter Pan & Wendy” is a frightfully uninteresting “good man” who does lightly comic things, but walks with an air of self-consciousness.
Indeed, if there can be a thesis for why this film does not work it is that: A self-consciousness. The secret ingredient of what makes Barrie’s Peter Pan work is that there is no self consciousness in any character. Points are made lightly and not dwelled on, and there is an effect of innocence about everyone because no one has quite learned shame, not even the grown ups.
There are elements of Barrie’s Peter within “Peter Pan & Wendy”: the thimble episode is reproduced fairly accurately, though given a strange extra purpose, the Lost Boys show a violent tendency reminiscent of their outburst in Act IV of the original play, and the blurred lines between make-believe and real are in line with the Peter of pretend meals and faux doctor visits.
However even these elements do not hide a film seemingly ashamed to be associated with Peter Pan. The Lost Boys are not all played by boys, which is fine, because not all boys look like boys. But the magic is broken when it is called attention to.
The film has a manufactured tragic backstory connecting Peter, Hook and the Darling family, which owes itself mostly to internet theories and competent young adult horror novels, and could work but doesn’t, because it all feels so convoluted and because Peter’s response doesn’t feel in line with the heartless boy of gay abandon.
There are, as already mentioned, things that work. The film illustrates the cyclical nature of the Neverland in interesting ways, Hook’s list of rules is amusing, the pirate ensemble does the best it can with horribly dry material which has “neither the accent of [Barrie,] nor the gait of [Barrie,] that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made [Barrie], and not made them well, they imitated [Barrie] so abominably,” and Wendy’s happy thoughts feel true to the Wendy who “grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.”
Lowe as Hook has its merits, though it resembles far more the Captain Swarthy of the Black Lake Islands than the educated Etonian.
If there can be one thing to be said to be missing from the film it is any joy. Barrie’s terrible masterpiece (as Peter Llewelyn Davies called it) works because it is domestic, tragic, and joyful. There is the domestic, and elements of the tragic within Lowery’s Peter, but there is none of the joy.