unromantic realities around him to where he
might just have a chance of being a pirate.
Years go by and Wendy, played by newcomer
Devin France, grows up a little bit. She’s become
obsessed with the fantasy of what she saw,
illustrating stories about the boy who left and
intently watching the trains outside her window.
Then one day the figure appears again and she
and her twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin)
make a mad dash for the freedom they presume
lies at the other end of the tracks.
The shadow figure, of course, is Peter Pan
(Yashua Mack), who is closer to birth than he
is to even being a teenager. Wearing a tattered
red prep school blazer and no shirt, he has a
mischievous grin, an insatiable thirst for danger
and a complete disregard for (or plain ignorance
of ) consequences, which will reach a particularly
disturbing climax later. His island is lush, mythic
and full of wonders and perils, both real (like
rusty, wrecked ships) and imagined (like aging,
which is shown to be grotesque and sad). The
Darlings delight in letting their wild sides take
over and fear only getting older.
Director Benh Zeitlin, after “Beasts” in 2012
went from a Sundance gem to a four-time
Oscar nominee (including best picture), spent
much of the interim working on this follow-up,
which he wrote with his sister Eliza Zeitlin. In a
director’s statement, he describes how neither
of them wanted to grow up, but sometime after
the wild success of “Beasts,” they realized they’d
have to. This is part of the reason why they’ve
chosen Wendy’s perspective instead of Peter’s.
But they get to have it both ways since they’ve
released Wendy from the cages of ideal Victorian
womanhood and made her into an adventurous