Wendy is the hook, really

For almost a hundred years, children of all ages have firmly believed in an island called Neverland that’s just outside the bedroom window and a million miles away. For almost a hundred years, they have tried to summon enough good thoughts to follow Wendy and John and Michael Darling over the dreamy border to a land where life is filled with adventure.

And it has taken almost a hundred years for filmmakers to make a faithful rendition of J.M. Barrie’s most famous play. The latest version of “Peter Pan,” directed by P.J. Hogan, may have had marketing issues and a tepid opening weekend, but it restores the magic of the classic tale by returning complexity and depth to its characters.

There have been many versions of “Peter Pan,” several by the author, a successful novelist and playwright. But the most widely known is the play, which Barrie wrote in a two-week burst of inspiration in 1902. Triumphantly produced in London in 1904, “Peter Pan” was instantly vacuumed into the Anglo-American psyche. There has been a silent film (1924), a radio play (1936), an animated film by Disney (1953), and a musical play (1954) that was later televised and several movie “sequels” (“Hook” and “Return to Never Land”).

Peter has been hijacked as a peanut butter, an ‘80s self-help metaphor (“The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up” by Dan Kiley), and an archetype endlessly analyzed by lit crits and psych types. Neverland became an infamous pop star’s isolated estate.

But a new surge of interest in the real “Peter Pan” marks the centennial. This month sees the debut of “Lost Girls,” a novel by highly regarded author Laurie Fox that is narrated by Wendy’s great-great granddaughter. In October, Miramax will release “J.M. Barrie’s Neverland.” Directed by Marc Forster, the film follows Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, through the theatrical debut of his most famous character. The cast also includes Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, and Dustin Hoffman (who, fittingly enough, played the title role in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook.”)

Most significant, though, is the bold new film produced by Universal, Revolution and Columbia studios. Amazingly, it’s the first live-action cinematic treatment of the original story.

A film’s crucial shift

This new “Peter Pan,” which has received mostly good reviews, not only features a real, live boy (Jeremy Sumpter) in the title role for only the second or third time in a century, it returns Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) to her place as the central character and narrator. This crucial shift brings forward the romance and pathos of the story, gives other characters like Captain Hook and Mr. Darling (both played by Jason Isaacs) new dimension, and infuses the movie with the folkloric quality of the original play.

Because what many people seem to have forgotten is that without Wendy, Peter Pan is nothing.

Yes, he’s the immortal child, the spirit of this and that, the archetype of whatsis. But that’s a little creepy if it isn’t grounded by a Wendy, as the folks behind the movie “Hook” found out.

“The point of view was always Wendy’s -- jumping out the window and coming back in,” producer Lucy Fisher says.

Wendy’s point of view, as envisioned by Hogan, is by no means stay-at-home. A $100-million budget bought a fantastic menu of special effects that would have thrilled Barrie who, in 1904, dazzled audiences when he wrote in a mechanical crocodile, a St. Bernard dog and a device to lift the Wendy House into the treetops.

In marketing the film, the spectacle card has been played for all it’s worth. There’s the pirate ship and flying swordplay scenes that owe as much to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and skateboarding videos as to Errol Flynn -- and scenes of creepily seductive mermaids who wouldn’t be out of place in Middle-earth. In fact, such movie fantasy credentials may have hurt it at the box office where it opened poorly against Peter Jackson’s opus. “I thought [‘Peter Pan’s’] trailers were good,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., a box office tracking firm. “They played up the fantasy aspect and made it look like a new rendering of this classic story. But no matter how hard you marketed, all the newcomers would stand in the shadow of ‘Lord of the Rings.’ “The good news for Peter Pan,” he added, “is that it may do very well on the long haul and of course on video. Family films do extraordinarily well on DVD and video.”

The success of “Lord of the Rings” actually proves a Barrie insight -- that adding swashbuckling adventure elements to a fairy story extends the appeal. Barrie, who had tried out his tales on real kids before bringing them to the stage, very mindfully stitched together elements aimed at different age groups. He also crafted a story that cut across gender lines, allowing his latest interpreters to find the romance embedded in the adventure story.

In early productions, actresses of equal stature played Wendy and Peter, but over time, Peter came to dominate. While the Disney version of the ‘50s may be too cheery for purists, it does give Wendy dignity and status as a storyteller. But many Americans grew up on the ‘60s televised performances of the musical version created as a Mary Martin vehicle which made short shrift of all other characters except Hook. No one remembers the Wendys who played opposite Sandy Duncan, Mia Farrow or Cathy Rigby.

Gentle Wendy is actually the protagonist of the play. She’s the one who imagines Neverland, learns to fly, is kidnapped by pirates and confronts truths about herself. As fascinating as Peter is, he’s not the character whose story is told -- he doesn’t change or learn from the events that unfold. In the end of some of Barrie’s versions, Peter doesn’t even remember what’s happened.

“As the mother of three girls and as a girl myself,” Fisher says, “I tried to bring to the material even before there was a director that Wendy should be more than a spectator to the story. She doesn’t want to just roll over and be Clara in ‘The Nutcracker Suite’ and just watch everything.”

The first thing Wendy does is conjure Peter, a character rooted in our cultural mythology.

“He’s the young dying reborn god -- the Narcissus, the Hyacinth, Dionysius,” says Ann Yeoman, author of “Now or Neverland, Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth: A Psychological Perspective on a Cultural Icon.” “He’s the Hermes character who can move from one world to the other. And of course he’s associated with Pan, who has a very ambiguous nature, being goaty and lascivious but also a life force.”

Under Hogan’s direction, he’s a preteen idol, a boy-group kind of guy. The filmmakers knew that casting a boy in a live-action version would ratchet up the relationship between Wendy and Peter, but they didn’t know how much.

“It’s much more romantic than I even imagined it, knowing that when you put a real boy and a real girl together and they’re 13 or 12, it’s going to be romantic,” Fisher says.

“All of a sudden on the big screen you have two flesh-and-blood people interacting,” producer Douglas Wick says. “You suddenly see their chemistry and you get more flesh and blood to the romance than you would in the play where it’s more metaphor.”

The romance also adds another marketing wrinkle: young love is the province of teenage girls. Girls have never been as sought-after an audience as boys, which may explain why most of the television and print ads have focused on the pirates and the battles.

Hogan has also flown in the face of the ‘50s-era Disney emphasis that had all females, from Tinkerbell to Tiger Lily, hovering flirtatiously around Peter. In this version, Tiger Lily (Carsen Gray) gets her own first love in John Darling (Harry Newell). Tinkerbell, still plenty jealous and scheming, comes off as a gang mascot who won’t be dissed.

“I think the appeal of the [Barrie] material is definitely because it’s prepubescent,” Yeoman says. “It’s the same quality you get in ‘Wuthering Heights’ with Heathcliff and Catherine when they’re children. When they’re adults, there’s no way to bring that wonderful passion and joy and sense of life into the adult world.”

Barrie’s play, though imbued with pre-World War I optimism and innocence, also portrays an oppressive Edwardian society, personified in the film by Aunt Millicent (Lynn Redgrave), a character created by Hogan to give today’s kids a better sense of how restricted girls’ options were at the time. While Wendy’s sweet and somewhat daffy parents dither, Millicent decisively declares that it’s time for Wendy to grow up, leave the nursery and transform herself into marriage material.

Of course Peter’s elusiveness is at the heart of the Barrie original. And it’s one of the several darker themes that give “Peter Pan” its staying power. Peter as a character springs from a number of sources, but the most potent was Barrie’s brother David, who died at 13. According to biographers, Barrie’s mourning mother turned away from her surviving son thereafter, making him the original “lost boy.”

Barrie as two characters

Barrie had no children; he dedicated “Peter Pan” to the three sons of friends Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, on whom the Darlings are based. In his relationship with them, as described by Andrew Birkin, author of “J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys,” Barrie was both the alluring Peter and the threatening Hook.

Hook was first played by Gerald du Maurier. His granddaughter, novelist Daphne du Maurier, wrote: “When Hook first paced his quarter deck in the year of 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls and even big boys of 12 were known to reach for their mother’s hand.... He was Father-but-for-the-grace-of-God; a lonely spirit that was terror and inspiration in one.”

Continuing the tradition, Jason Isaacs plays both Hook and Mr. Darling on screen. But the father-daughter relationship is more complicated in the new movie; their interdependence (Mr. Darling is pushed to improve his business standing in light of Wendy’s anticipated growing up) foreshadows Wendy’s reaction to Captain Hook.

As played by Isaacs, Captain Hook is a charismatic figure with the glamour -- and the pathos -- of a fading rock star (for many girls and women a more enticing figure than Peter’s sweet pop-star persona). First seen shirtless in his bachelor-pad cabin, Hook is buff, lightly tattooed and decked out in velvet and leather. His black curls bring to mind both “This Is Spinal Tap” and 17th century hairdressing.

Wendy thinks he’s cool.

“She’s a storyteller,” Fisher says. “She wants adventure. She’s also fascinated by Hook. He is a story character that is potent and interesting and she is brave and curious.”

This “Peter Pan” is a female-friendly movie in other ways. The impossibly lovely and charming Mrs. Darling (Olivia Williams) is the mother all women want to be, though Barrie’s portrait, once criticized as sentimental, now seems deliciously and knowingly fey.

Although Barrie’s relations with his own mother are the stuff of psychiatric case histories, she was the original storyteller, Birkin says. Wendy’s voice is an authentic girl’s voice because Barrie based the character on his mother’s stories about her girlhood, when she raised her brothers after they lost their mother. Much of the reason “Peter Pan” seems destined to join Oedipus, Hamlet and other mythic literary works is that it not only celebrates the oral tradition, it is derived from it.

“I always see Wendy as that part of Barrie that he inherited from his mother: the storyteller,” Yeoman says. “She embodies that openness to the world of fantasy and the imagination but also the capacity to come back. Storytelling -- any artistic pursuit -- is about building that bridge. Being able to go there but also being able to come back.”

As an artist, Barrie lived in a world still bound by remnant Victorian restrictions -- a world where, as he discovered during the production of an earlier play, the word “stomach” could not be used on the stage.

“Barrie felt that Edwardian England crushed his own creativity,” Yeoman says. “I don’t think Barrie ever resolved how to be his authentic creative self in the world. He leaves the end of the story with ‘OK, life carries on.’ Wendy has her own daughter. But Peter’s on the other side of the window.”

One of the earliest scenes shot for the movie was a final scene showing grown-up Wendy, but in the end the filmmakers decided not to use it. They didn’t want to ask audiences, after following the young Wendy throughout the course of the movie, to quickly transfer their loyalties to a new grown-up character.

As a result, the movie ends where most of us remember “Peter Pan” ending, in a never-never twilight at a crossroads of life, with Peter flying back to a fantasy world and Wendy opting to stay at home in reality.

“Peter Pan” the work is as timeless as Peter Pan the character because Barrie wisely avoided a further ex- ploration of the pros and cons of growing up. Although Barrie and Wendy and today’s filmmakers felt the same pang in leav- ing Peter eternally on the other side of the win- dow, that is where we and our children and our children’s chil- dren need him, ever ready to teach us to fly and to guide us to the second star on the right.