Growing up is such a barbarous business.

Peter Pan

(2003)

(SPOILERS) The advent of the latest, disastrous, iteration of JM Barrie’s classic had me wondering if the whole idea of translating the story to screen is doomed, and that Disney simply got lucky first time. So in dutifully investigating a few previous versions, I began with one I hadn’t caught before; PJ Hogan’s commendably faithful attempt, as much as Joe Wright’s is entirely disrespectful. Well, partially commendably. Perhaps a mid-ground between diligence to the original text and invention is the optimum path, as Hogan’s picture is admirable in many respects – and vastly superior to Wright’s – but still fails to quite distil magic.

Pan can take some comfort that this Peter was no more successful; some sources give it as being even more expensive (adjusting for inflation); $130m budget according to Wikipedia, while Box Office Mojo offers a more conservative $100m. Either way, that’s not peanuts. The outlay seems the more absurd given that Peter Pan conspires to follow the tradition of other live action adaptations, such that it looks highly artificial, limited and stage-bound for much of the time. The effects are very variable, ranging from the rather good (the crocodile) to the not so (London and Neverland look like advent calendar animations, such that one wonders if this was intentional). You’re left wondering where all the money went (some blame the art department eating up the budget and causing overruns).

One is also led to speculate whether Hogan, being Australian, has a natural affinity for ungainly slapstick, and if that’s common to his fellow nationals or just the ones with his surname. Probably not the latter, as there are points where this could have been directed by Baz Lurhmann, such is the frenetically whacky action (which, lacking comic timing, makes it mostly unfunny). Peter (Jeremy Sumpter), darting about after his shadow, or Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier) flitting hither and thither and pulling exaggerated faces is more suggestive of Drop Dead Fred than a hallowed classic (Hogan wrote the screenplay with Michael Goldenberg, also credited with the adaption of Contact, the fourth Harry Potter and – ahem – Green Lantern).

But Peter Pan is also quite deferent to the source material, getting to grips with the highs and lows of a boy who refuses to grow up (“Will they send me to school. And then, to an office? Then I shall be a man”; succinctly put), the tragic side of that position, his strange oedipal longing for Wendy (he and the Lost Boys wish to adopt her as their mother, while they see him as their father; “Mother and father are fighting again”), and her consequent distress that he feels nothing for her.

The screenplay even lends Hook substance, a man whose greatest fear is loneliness and who is even able to commiserate with Wendy at one point (and she, indicative that she wants more than Peter is willing to offer, finds him entrancing) and plot with Tinkerbell.

Which rather shows up the picture’s biggest failing. It’s highly episodic, and often incidental, taking in escapes, captures, being entertained by Hook, and his attempt to poison Peter; all of them are accurate to Barrie’s sacred text but fail to finesse themselves into a picture with much momentum. There’s also the issue of serving stage play elements that don’t perhaps works so well on the big screen (all together now; “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do”). It’s a mistake to trust goodwill in the theatrical template, and the panto aspects of Peter Pan can’t necessarily be relied upon to win over little rascals in an alternate medium.

Such was their studiousness, Hogan and Goldenberg even shot an ultimately unused epilogue where Peter returns to Wendy. Peeved that she is now grown and married, he takes her daughter to Neverland as his new “mother”. What is included, in contrast to Wright, who blanched at the implications, is Tiger Lilly being an Indian, or a “savage”; Hogan is happy to go there. Probably, again, because he’s Australian, and insensitive to such things.

Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) John (Harry Newell) and Michael (Freddie Popplewell) all provide creditable performances, the former particularly so (Hurd-Wood is the only one of the trio who has acted since). They’re all impossibly posh, another aspect Wright eschewed with his ragamuffin Peter. Who is here played by the very Californian (or Aryan, as you will) looking Jeremy Sumpter. His American twang gives the character a kind of inverse exoticism, I guess. Sumpter certainly handles the role better than Levi Miller would recently. Nevertheless, he still isn’t really able to lend much depth to the character. Hogan, for all his willingness to chart a course for the dark side, is too enamoured of the fizzy pop elements to abide there for long.

The adults mostly score solidly. Jason Isaacs cuts a better Hook than Darling. Indeed, as the former he comes on like a dishevelled ex-rock star, and one might think he’d been watching Johnny Depp had this not come out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean. His Hook is mostly great fun, differentiated and worthy by being more dangerous and inelegant than Hoffman’s incarnation. The most memorable lines are his (“Growing up is such a barbarous business”, mocking Peter’s ephemerality in the eyes of others; “There is another in your place. He is called husband”), and as he opines that Pan will “die alone and unloved, just like me”, you almost feel sympathy for the brute. As Darling, a man who has put his dreams away in a drawer, to sacrifice them for his family, he’s more successful as the repressed man than the one who rediscovers himself in the final scene.

Richard Briers makes a genial fist of things as an elderly Smee, even breaking the fourth wall at one point (“Very exciting, two dead already”). Olivia Williams, and particularly Lynn Redgrave (as a specially created character, Aunt Millicent) are affecting, while Saffron Burrows’ narration is perfectly pitched. But, while this a well-intentioned adaptation, and it’s unlikely the planned Disney live-action retake will be anywhere near as observant of the finer details, Hogan lacks the vision to bring it off. It may be that the material defeats the medium, that the heightened manner of the stage or animation is a better canvas. It certainly got the better of Spielberg, and everyone thought he would be the perfect fit. Peter Pan feels like Hogan inhaled a mouthful of fairy dust and spat it across the screen; it’s brightly coloured and energetic, but also garish and visually undisciplined.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Lieutenant, you run this station like chicken night in Turkey.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) (SPOILERS) You can’t read a review of Assault on Precinct 13 with stumbling over references to its indebtedness – mostly to Howard Hawks – and that was a preface for me when I first caught it on Season Three of BBC2’s Moviedrome (I later picked up the 4Front VHS). In Precinct 13 ’s case, it can feel almost like an attempt to undercut it, to suggest it isn’t quite that original, actually, because: look. On the other hand, John Carpenter was entirely upfront about his influences (not least Hawks), and that he originally envisaged it as an outright siege western (rather than an, you know, urban one). There are times when influences can truly bog a movie down, if it doesn’t have enough going for it in its own right. That’s never the case with Assault on Precinct 13 . Halloween may have sparked Carpenter’s fame and maximised his opportunities, but it’s this picture that really evidences his style, his potential and his masterful facility with music.

The wolves are running. Perhaps you would do something to stop their bite?

The Box of Delights (1984) If you were at a formative age when it was first broadcast, a festive viewing of The Box of Delights may well have become an annual ritual. The BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s 1935 novel is perhaps the ultimate cosy yuletide treat. On a TV screen, at any rate. To an extent, this is exactly the kind of unashamedly middle class-orientated bread-and-butter period production the corporation now thinks twice about; ever so posh kids having jolly adventures in a nostalgic netherworld of Interwar Britannia. Fortunately, there’s more to it than that. There is something genuinely evocative about Box ’s mythic landscape, a place where dream and reality and time and place are unfixed and where Christmas is guaranteed a blanket of thick snow. Key to this is the atmosphere instilled by director Renny Rye. Most BBC fantasy fare doe not age well but The Box of Delights is blessed with a sinister-yet-familiar charm, such that even the creakier production decisi

White nights getting to you?

Insomnia (2002) (SPOILERS) I’ve never been mad keen on Insomnia . It’s well made, well-acted, the screenplay is solid and it fits in neatly with Christopher Nolan’s abiding thematic interests, but it’s… There’s something entirely adequateabout it. It isn’t pushing any kind of envelope. It’s happy to be the genre-bound crime study it is and nothing more, something emphasised by Pacino’s umpteenth turn as an under-pressure cop.

We got two honkies out there dressed like Hassidic diamond merchants.

The Blues Brothers (1980) (SPOILERS) I had limited awareness of John Belushi’s immense mythos before The Blues Brothers arrived on retail video in the UK (so 1991?) My familiarity with SNL performers really began with Ghostbusters ’ release, which meant picking up the trail of Jake and Elwood was very much a retrospective deal. I knew Animal House , knew Belushi’s impact there, knew 1941 (the Jaws parody was the best bit), knew Wired was a biopic better avoided. But the minor renaissance he, and they, underwent in the UK in the early ’90s seemed to have been initiated by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, of all things; Everybody Needs Somebody was part of their That Sounds Good to Me medley, the first of their hits not to make No.1, and Everybody ’s subsequent single release then just missed the Top Ten. Perhaps it was this that hastened CIC/Universal to putting the comedy out on video. Had the movie done the rounds on UK TV in the 80s? If so, it managed to pass me by. Even bef

How do you melt somebody’s lug wrench?

Starman (1984) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s unlikely SF romance. Unlikely, because the director has done nothing before or since suggesting an affinity for the romantic fairy tale, and yet he proves surprisingly attuned to Starman ’s general vibes. As do his stars and Jack Nitzsche, furnishing the score in a rare non-showing from the director-composer. Indeed, if there’s a bum note here, it’s the fairly ho-hum screenplay; the lustre of Starman isn’t exactly that of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but it’s very nearly stitching together something special from resolutely average source material.

He must have eaten a whole rhino horn!

Fierce Creatures (1997) (SPOILERS) “ I wouldn’t have married Alyce Faye Eicheberger and I wouldn’t have made Fierce Creatures.” So said John Cleese , when industrial-sized, now-ex gourmand Michael Winner, of Winner’s Dinners , Death Wish II and You Must Be Joking! fame (one of those is a legitimate treasure, but only one) asked him what he would do differently if he could live his life again. One of the regrets identified in the response being Cleese’s one-time wife (one-time of two other one-time wives, with the present one mercifully, for John’s sake, ongoing) and the other being the much-anticipated Death Fish II , the sequel to monster hit A Fish Called Wanda. Wanda was a movie that proved all Cleese’s meticulous, focus-group-tested honing and analysis of comedy was justified. Fierce Creatures proved the reverse.

I dreamed about a guy in a dirty red and green sweater.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (SPOILERS) I first saw A Nightmare on Elm Street a little under a decade after its release, and I was distinctly underwhelmed five or so sequels and all the hype. Not that it didn’t have its moments, but there was an “It’ll do” quality that reflects most of the Wes Craven movies I’ve seen. Aside from the postmodern tease of A New Nightmare – like Last Action Hero , unfairly maligned – I’d never bothered with the rest of the series, in part because I’m just not that big a horror buff, but also because the rule that the first is usually the best in any series, irrespective of genre, tends to hold out more often than not. So now I’m finally getting round to them, and it seemed only fair to start by giving Freddy’s first another shot. My initial reaction holds true.

Maybe he had one too many peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches.

3000 Miles to Graceland (2001) (SPOILERS) The kind of movie that makes your average Tarantino knockoff look classy, 3000 Miles to Graceland is both aggressively unpleasant and acutely absent any virtues, either as a script or a stylistic exercise. The most baffling thing about it is how it attracted Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell, particularly since both ought to have been extra choosy at this point, having toplined expensive bombs in the previous half decade that made them significantly less bankable names. And if you’re wondering how this managed to cost the $62m reported on Wiki, it didn’t; Franchise Pictures, one of the backers, was in the business of fraudulently inflating budgets .

Ours is the richest banking house in Europe, and we’re still being kicked.

The House of Rothschild (1934) (SPOILERS) Fox’s Rothschild family propaganda pic does a pretty good job presenting the clan as poor, maligned, oppressed Jews who fought back in the only way available to them: making money, lots of lovely money! Indeed, it occurred to me watching The House of Rothschild , that for all its inclusion of a rotter of a Nazi stand-in (played by Boris Karloff), Hitler must have just loved the movie, as it’s essentially paying the family the compliment of being very very good at doing their very best to make money from everyone left, right and centre. It’s thus unsurprising to learn that a scene was used in the anti-Semitic (you might guess as much from the title) The Eternal Jew .

No, I ain’t a good man. I ain’t the worst either.

A Perfect World (1993) (SPOILERS) It’s easy to assume, retrospectively, that Clint’s career renaissance continued uninterrupted from Unforgiven to, pretty much, now, with his workhorse output ensuring he was never more than a movie away from another success. The nineties weren’t such a sure thing, though. Follow-up In the Line of Fire , a (by then) very rare actor-for-hire gig, made him seem like a new-found sexagenarian box office draw, having last mustered a dependably keen audience response as far back as 1986 and Heartbreak Ridge . But at home, at least, only The Bridges of Madison County – which he took over as director at a late stage, having already agreed to star – and the not-inexpensive Space Cowboys really scored before his real feted streak began with Mystic River. However, there was another movie in there that did strong business. Just not in the US: A Perfect World .

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog