march 2–15, 2020 | new york 81some fairy talesare treasure
troves for folklorists, who plumb
their depths for themes and archetypes
often shared by disparate cultures. Other
fairy tales are best left unplumbed. Take
J. M. Barrie’s playPeter Pan,which the
writer-director Benh Zeitlin has reimag-
ined and retitledWendy.As in Zeitlin’s
attention-grabbing debut,Beasts of the
Southern Wild,the story is told in a free-
wheeling, imagistic style plainly influ-
enced by Terrence Malick and similarly
steeped in anxiety over civilization’s threat
to the environment. Zeitlin—who was
raised by folklore scholars and has more or
less remained in the family busi-
ness—depicts the boy who refuses
to grow up as a dreadlocked imp
who is intimately connected to an
undersea creature called Mother,
who looks like a giant, shimmer-
ing catfish. Mother appears to
represent Nature (and youth, and life, and
hope, etc.) and communicates with her
Lost Boys and Girls through geysers and
volcanic eruptions on a remote island. Her
aura is reminiscent of Barrie’s Tinker Bell,
but the consequences of not believing in
Mother’s mystical beneficence are far more
dire: You promptly get old, are exiled from
paradise, and develop piratical impulses.
On paper, Zeitlin’s story ties together bet-
ter thanPeter Pan’s, in which the char-
acters seem random—dogs who serve as
nannies, Native American princesses, fair-ies who are applauded back to life, clock-
swallowing crocodiles. But random turns
out to be a hell of a lot more fun.
The movie’s prologue is the only thrilling
part. Zeitlin’s titular heroine and narrator
first appears as a toddler in her mother’s
diner; it’s adjacent to a train station, and
she watches a little boy celebrating his
birthday throw a fit, wander out onto the
tracks, climb a ladder to the top of a car,
and go chugging off to who knows where.
Years later, Wendy (Devin France) still
lives upstairs from that diner and has iden-
tical twin brothers named Douglas and
James (Gage and Gavin Naquin). Unlike
the adults, she doesn’t just mourn
the disappearance of that boy;
she seems to envy him for hav-
ing escaped. She wants adven-
ture before she turns out like her
mom, once a badass but now sag-
ging under the weight of grown-
up responsibilities. When Peter Pan (Yas-
hua Mack) and his wayward shadow show
up, the three children scamper after him
onto a passing train and leave the swamps
and the factories behind.
It’s an exhilarating trip until that island
looms, whereupon Peter greets its belching
volcano with “Hey, Mother! Happy to see
you too!” That’s when I started to get con-
fused. In the originalPeter Pan, Wendy was
whisked away to serve as a mother to the
Lost Boys, who revel in their eternal youth
but still—here’s the dramatic tension—crave maternal affection and guidance.
Except there’s a mother here already: a
mother of a mother, Mother Nature. There
seems little for Wendy to do but watch the
kids frolic with Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s
camera chasing after them (he looks to
be getting in on the fun) and Dan Romer
and Zeitlin’s score surging and swooping
from crescendo to crescendo to manufac-
ture and sustain momentum. The style is
immersive, meant to envelop us and bring
us into the story, but it ends up making the
movie feel abstract and distant. And there’s
a void at the center. Mack’s Peter is either
talking to Mother or on his own rascally
wavelength. He seems much younger than
Wendy, who doesn’t have much of a rela-
tionship with him. (When Barrie rewrote
his play as a novel, he called it Peter and
Wendy. Their bond is what holds the ram-
shackle fairy tale together.)
The pirate equivalents are a loose tribe
of old men and women who loll around the
arid part of the island lamenting the youth
that was taken from them because they
had sad thoughts and doubted themselves.
They hate on Mother something fierce. One
of them (whose identity is a surprise) loses
a hand, acquires a hook, and hatches a plan
to murder Mother, an act he is convinced
will turn him back into a child—a baffling
notion we have to accept or risk losing
interest in the film altogether. By the time
of the climactic duel, Zeitlin has managed
to wind his way back to the specifics of Bar-
rie’s Peter Pan but in a way that feels grimly
intellectualized. Look, it’s Captain Hook—
only without the arrrrs and the cool pirate
costume and the paranoid fixation on a
croc. Anything a kid (or the kid in us) would
get excited about has been purged.
Beasts of the Southern Wild also un-
folded on a semi-abstract plane, but it was
grounded in a vivid, specific sense of place
(the Louisiana bayou) and in the clear,
watchful face of Quvenzhané Wallis as a
moppet who scans the water and air for
signals from her absent mother. Expressive
as France’s Wendy is, we don’t feel the same
sort of connection. Barrie’s heroine is wilt-
ing under a rigid, unfeeling mother in an
England laboring to keep up appearances
in the wake of Queen Victoria’s death, and
for a limited time, she finds Peter’s refusal
to grow up—his unyielding allegiance to
anarchism—enchanting. The random-
ness of Barrie’s ingredients suggests a
child asserting his freedom: I can too bring
together pirates and Indians and crocodiles
that go ticktock! He can and does, and the
world is more magical for it, while Zeitlin’s
island of abrasive kids, depressive senior
citizens, a laser-beam-shooting catfish, and
a hyperactive cinematographer feels more
like art-house purgatory. ■MOVIES / DAVID EDELSTEINPeter PonderousWendy takes a children’s classicinto art-house Neverland.WENDY
DIRECTED BY
BENH ZEITLIN.
SEARCHLIGHT
PICTURES. PG-13.PHOTOGRAPH: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION