Warning: This article contains spoilers for Peter Pan & Wendy.
We all know that, in the past, Disney hasn’t been afraid to shy away from the darker, more adult elements of its source material. From the brutal murder of the titular character’s mother in Bambi to Frollo’s criminal abuse of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, these classic kids’ movies can sometimes seem like they’re for anybody but children.
With that said, much classic children’s literature is macabre and full of adult themes. The Grimm fairy tales which many famous House of Mouse cartoons are based on are famously gruesome, as is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, written in roughly the same era the German brothers were compiling and refining their list of folk stories. A few decades after those tales had traumatized kids everywhere, J.M. Barrie introduced the character of Peter Pan to the world, and that story might just be the darkest, saddest, and most complex of all of these examples – yet the newest Disney attempt at retelling the tale, Peter Pan & Wendy, seems to have been focusing more on paying homage to this history than creating a truly good film.
The latest iteration of the Pan story certainly works its dark elements well. We effectively see Peter die at one point, and Jude Law’s Hook vibrates with menace during some of the more intense scenes. It’s not quite Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s hardly Looney Tunes either. More interestingly, and much to the chagrin of a very specific type of terminally online person, it also shifts the focus on the story to Wendy, adding more depth to her character than the animated classic – and coming closer to her depiction in the original J.M. Barrie play. While Pan remains a boy forever, eschewing the notion of growing up and adult responsibility — even at the cost of losing his family — Wendy covers both sides of the coin. She’s the one who goes through the journey; she’s our hero. Peter Pan & Wendy explores this more than the animated original.
When making The Green Knight, Pan director David Lowery was clearly devoted to the epic poem the Dev Patel film was based on, and the way he’s approached this film also points to a deeper understanding of the Pan source material. The original play and novel in the Pan universe have been studied and interpreted by Freudians, feminists, and every kind of philosophy in between, so there’s plenty of literature on the topic to sink your teeth into, and Lowery appears to have given all of them a go.
You can’t understand Barrie’s work — and his obsession with recapturing childhood — without knowing about his life. His family was beset by tragedy; when Barrie was a boy his older brother and idol died in a skating accident. He was also tiny in stature, and famously bitter about how it affected his social and sexual standing — something that height didn’t do in childhood.
Prior to writing Peter Pan, the Scottish playwright became obsessed with a married socialite named Sylvia Du Maurier, who was married to a man named Arthur Llewelyn Davies. While trying to ingratiate himself into her life, Barrie played games with her young sons (who he’d later go on to unofficially adopt after the tragic deaths of their parents – making them the original lost boys), and it was these stories that formed the basis of Pan. Meanwhile his wife, Mary Ansell, began an affair, which led to a divorce and the painful public revelation they’d never consummated their marriage. This is all clear to see when the play and novel are studied deeply, and this underlying theme of loss and longing for childhood is strong in Disney’s newest rendition.
The situation with his wife and unrequited love of Du Maurier also explains his interest in female power and its subtleties. Barrie was very clear that he saw women as superior in mind to men, which is why we see Wendy cleverly (and mostly benevolently, in the film at least) manipulating Peter. Later readings of her character have led scholars to believe she’s both a mother and wicked-witch archetype, nurturing yet destroying magic. Although Peter Pan & Wendy doesn’t quite have the Darling daughter turn green, her and Peter disagree and are even antagonistic with each other at points. And it’s her that saves the day in this version too – again, showing Lowery has thought deeply about the tweaks he made to the Disney animated original.
It’s all very complex and cool and admirable, and as a Barrie and film nerd it’s very intriguing, but there’s a simple problem. As a movie, Peter Pan & Wendy fails to do anything but be adequately entertaining, constrained by wooden dialogue and the clumsiness of CGI compared to the iconic animated version. The only standout performance is Jude Law, who veers from dangerous to comic expertly, all while maintaining an on-screen magnetism like no other. He even manages to make his dialogue interesting.
And, on that note, the character conversations that are supposed to subtly reveal the themes of the film instead do the equivalent of stripping the covers off in the morning, exposing the audience to exactly what the moviemakers want to say. Obviously, this is a kids’ film, so you shouldn’t be expecting David Lynch-levels of abstraction, but Disney (especially via Pixar) has proven it can strike that balance between an obvious message for the kids and a more subtle delivery for the adults. Yet here, the conglomerate has failed.
That’s not even the saddest thing about Peter Pan & Wendy. Nor is it that we see Pan return to Neverland at the film’s climax, determined to stay in the purgatory of childhood as everyone he knows and loves moves on. And it’s not the fact that Law’s Hook doesn’t get anywhere near enough screen time. It’s not even that Wendy finally getting the complex character treatment she deserves was let down by some exceedingly average writing, or the bad choreography in fight scenes. It’s the fact that Lowery had all the tools and all the ambition to do something great with this iconic story, and it’s ended up being something you might half-watch at Christmas while slightly drunk. And, to make things even worse: this is one of the better live-action Disney remakes out there. Perhaps we should just stick to the classics.
