Peter Pan - Also for Those Who've Grown Up

Nathan's rating: my rating:

My pal Nathan managed to get himself into an advance screening of P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan a week before it opened. (He wouldn't tell me who he had to sleep with.) He wasn't very impressed.

His main complaint was that it was darker than the "original" (i.e. the animated movie Disney made 50 years ago), and not as lighthearted as Hook. Which I suspect was intentional.

I just saw the film myself, and I agree that it was darker, but that's because it was truer to the original book (written 99 years ago). Granted, it's still not a scene-for-scene enactment of J.M. Barrie's novella or is play, but the book had a dry Victorian underbelly to it, and so does Hogan's film. Granted, the Disney version was suprisingly faithful as well (by Hollywood standards), so Hogan's is also pretty close to that.

One thing this production has that all the others before have lacked is sex. OK, it's more like sensuality or romance. Disney's version was simply about a boy who wouldn't grow up; this one is about a boy and girl who are both very much on the verge of doing so. The stage versions have always cast small women in the role of Peter, so the whole idea of pre-adolescent flirting between Sandy Duncan or Kathy Rigby and the young woman playing Wendy never really worked. But with the "inspired" casting of an actual 12-year-old boy in the title role, it works here, and the almost-sexual tension between the two actors feels very real. At the least, one close-up of Jeremy Sumpter gently breaking into a smile was enough to make me wish I were a 12-year-old girl, with a chance to talk him into growing up with me. {grin}

The movie isn't all darkness and syrup, though. There are some fun action scenes, a fair amount of slapstick for the kiddies, and plenty of silly-chuckle humor of the sort you'd expect in a movie about a bunch of kids and imaginary pirates, and in which the children's nursemaid in the Darling household is a dog (actually played down a bit from the novel).

I'm happy to report that the Indians come across better in their brief appearance here than in the Disney version. It dispenses with Disney's embarrassing "clap if you believe in fairies" audience-participation ploy in favor of an approach closer to the book's handling of it.

My main disappointment is with the special effects. They were usually quite good, but there were frequently spots where instead of giving the illusion of flight, Peter's motions looked more like the boy-on-a-wire shots they were. And the less said about the pink cotton candy clouds the better.

I just happened to look at the user ratings on IMDB.com, and the film is scoring least-favorably among males under 18, and better across all age groups among females. The poor showing among boys is ironic, but not really surprising, because the general message of the story seems to be that boys are incomplete, and need to grow up. The characters say as much at one point. But the film then shows otherwise, when Peter demonstrates that he does have real feelings; he may be immature, but he does know what love is, even if he doesn't want to. Of course the boys in the audience probably don't appreciate that he shows this completeness by crying, and through his reaction to receiving a "thimble" from Wendy. The film (and book) is told from a female character's point of view, so the better showing among women - who also remember being 12-year-old girls - makes sense.