Slightly

Some notes on Peter Pan (2003), at the Brattle.

It was painted:  like a pantomine in N. C. Wyeth's dreams, great rose-pink towering clouds, and a backdrop of islands.  All gorgeously unreal, like pages in a moving picture-book.  Maxfield Parrish on mushrooms.  And the peg-legged parrot was animatronic!  An actual toy.  When was the last time you saw that?

The vertiginous flight to Neverland, through brilliant whirling planets, was sheer Diana Wynne Jones.  (I'm thinking of that scene in The Merlin Conspiracy, leaping through the multiverse behind a goat.)

Jason Isaacs is a definitive Hook:  seductive and psychopathic and horribly insecure.  Such a elegant moire of courtesy and savagery.  Glittering black.  And blackly comic:  in a panic, scrabbling for good thoughts, he mutters, "Ripping!  Killing!  Lawyers!  Dentists!  Kittens on spikes! White death, black death!  Any death!  A nice cup of tea!"  He dies like a Etonian.  (That croc is the stuff of nightmares.)

As is traditional, Isaacs is also a lovely meek bewildered Mr. Darling.  At their last happy family evening, he sings "Stick close to your desk, and never go to sea..."

Meanwhile out to sea, his crew is hideous and sentimental, in the classic style.  Richard Briers is a splendid Smee, ever anxious to oblige:  "Whisky?"  "I'm a little girl."  "Rum?"

A few of the earlier scenes with Nana were excessively uproarious, as if from a Disneyer film.  (There’s something about St. Bernards that unbalances directors.)  I would have liked more contrast between London and Neverland.

However, their Aunt sits upright in the drawing room, reading War of the Worlds.  Lovely joke.

(Yes, she’s uncanonical.  I think Lynn Redgrave just wanted a part, and how could they refuse her?)

I missed John's having his iconic top hat when he flew off (I'm a traditionalist), and was inordinately pleased when he swooped down to snatch one in the London streets.  Of course he loses it somewhere in Neverland; he comes back with a pirate's bicorne.  That's summer camp for you.

I really liked that you could tell which Lost Boy was which, straight off.  Excellent casting.  I was especially fond of Slightly.

Michael’s teddy bear is a Lost Boy in its own right.

Loved the mermaids, beautiful and perilous, reaching with their blue-webbed taloned hands at air and earth, to pull them down.

I quite liked their Tink:  a beauty who's not afraid to mug outrageously.  She has the flitterwittedness, the rage, the mischief and possessiveness.

Their fairies are Richard Dadd.  Rock.

sovay : “I am sorry Angela Carter was not alive to review this film.”

This was famously the sexy Peter Pan; but not outrageously.  It’s all there in the book:  growing up is a terror.  But what this film worries at is not what lies beyond adolescence, not the office and the bills; but how you get there, the journey.  “Oh, I am changing, changing, fearfully changing.”  Casting Peter as a thirteen-year-old boy will do that.  I do love a good principal boy, but in most productions there’s no threat.  She is grown up already, pretending to refuse what’s past for her, on holiday from gender.  A woman playing Peter is a glorious joke:  that girl can be boyish; she will never be a man.  (That of course could be her tragedy.  I’ve never seen it done that way.  I’d like to.)

This Peter is at once more innocent and perilous.  As children and inhuman creatures don’t, he doesn’t get it.  He rejoices, he crows; but he doesn’t wink.  Or love.  And he awakens things in Wendy he can’t deal with at all.  sovay (who was there with a friend and her small daughter) wrote of Jeremy Sumpter, their Pan:  "He has a faun's crooked, cocky smile that would be a satyr's in a year if he grew into it, but he never will.”  And that tension and his bafflement seriously work.  Peter in the end refuses, as he always does, to grow up.  He remains a spirit and a boy; Wendy journeys on.

"All a bit tragic, really, innit?" says Smee.

But joy of joys, this Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) is fierce.  Not just physically, though she can sword fight like a pirate queen.  (Her persona is Red Gill, and she rocks.  Beats the soppy Wendy-house dolly, mending pretend socks.)  This Wendy is neither a ragdoll nor an action figure, but a nascent heroine; she wants to go beyond Neverland, to explore the future, where it’s scary and strange and ecstatic.  She’s curious.  She’s brave.  At their parting, echoing his own essential line, Peter says to her:  “To live will be an awfully big adventure.”

And it will.

But as a child, she’s had her pirate ship, aglow with elf-light, sailing through drowned churches in a London fog.

Nine