Peter Pan - 1924, d. Herbert Brenon - youtube
Peter Pan - 1953, d. Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson - Disney+
Hook - 1991, d. Steven Spielberg - Netflix
Peter Pan and Wendy - 2023, d. David Lowery - Disney+
"I don't ever want to be a man. I always want to be a little boy and have fun!" - Peter Pan
I have been alive for just shy of 2550 weeks, and in the past week I have spent more time partaking in and thinking about Peter Pan then every week prior to that in total. I have never really cared much for Peter Pan as a character, nor the "boy who never grew up" mythos. Neverland has never enchanted me as an escapist fantasy.
There are famous people who have obsessed over Peter Pan... Michael Jackson probably the most notable, himself a boy who never truly grew up. Stephen Spielberg was another, as for quite some long time in the first two decades of his career, he seemed to be targeted by his most severe critics as a director who never wanted to grow up. The Blank Check podcast has been picking at Spielbergs early career, especially framed in the light of his pseudo-biographical film The Fablemans, leading up to the trifecta that was the turning point in his career: Hook, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.
But I'm here to talk about Peter Pan, not Stephen Spielberg, suffice it to say that I decided to watch Hook (perhaps for a second time?) before listening to the Blank Check episode on it, and knowing the pop-culture tourist tendencies that I have, I knew I would be sampling other Pan wares soon after.
Hook is an "unofficial" (whatever that means) sequel that presupposes that one knows the tale of
Peter Pan rather intimately, which, at the time of viewing, I did not. It posits Robin Williams as Peter Banning, a workaholic father of two who can't seem to break away from his career to spend time with his children. It's very Spielbergian in this regards, the regrets of fatherhood and the feeling that one's career means both abandoning one's own youthful enthusiasms and one's tolerance for youth. Many times Williams' Peter yells at his pre-teen son to grow up.
In a 1992 interview (stealing from the research done by the team at Blank Check) Spielberg said about initially abandoning his intents for a faithful Pan adaptation following the birth of his son "...suddenly I couldn’t be Peter Pan any more. I had to be his father. That’s literally the reason I didn’t do the movie back then. And I had everything ready and Elliot Scott hired to do the sets in London. In a way, my son took my childhood away from me.” This unlocks a lot of Hook for me, the fact that Peter has given up his childhood to be married, and to have children and to have a career...he's bitter and resentful for having let go of his eternal youth.
Hook is not a great film, but then again, I don't think Peter Pan in general is a great story. Hook at least has a...ahem... hook to it, a reason for existing, which is to remind adults that it's okay to still connect with your childhood.
It's a long, long half hour (plus!) of the film before we get any hint of real whimsy or magic, and in that time the film is exploring its theme intensely while also trying to catch us up on Peter's life following the fabled story. It's definitely too long and most of it wholly unnecessary (although there's a bittersweet sentiment to Wendy becoming the mother to lost boys for decades, and something unsettlingly weird about Peter, effectively, imprinting on Wendy's granddaughter...it's like when Steve Rogers kisses Sharon Carter in Captain America:Civil War...it's hard to explain exactly why it's wrong, we just sense that it is).
Peter's kids are kidnapped by Captain Hook (how Hook enters the real world and steals the kids, I don't rightly understand) and Peter is brought to Neverland by Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) to get them back. Peter, having forgotten all about his past youth, hasn't the skills, the magic, nor the playfulness to take on Cook. Tinkerbell bargains with Cook to get Peter into fighting shape over three days so the pirates can have their epic war with the Lost Boys that they've been dreaming of (boys will be boys). This leads Peter to the current spate of Lost Boys who have been living under the protection of Rufio. Where we see Lost Boys in other interpretations in animal costumes (like Max from Where the Wild Things Are), here they're like the lost children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, all feral looking.
The best part of Hook is the actual Hook of the film. Dustin Hoffman puts on a surprisingly game performance (I don't know why I'm surprised any time Hoffman puts on a game performance, I always just am...like I think he's a more annoyingly serious actor than he is) and his plot to woo the children, which leads to him effectively adopting Peter's son Jack, is the smartest and most resonant part of the film. Unfortunately, Hook isn't terribly interested in developing Captain Hook beyond his well-mannered, if anxiety-ridden pirate persona. It never truly establishes any desires, any objectives, any growth beyond Peter's destruction, and the film is the poorer for it.
Roberts is wasted as Tinkerbell, a real thankless role, given a sub-plot that intones that she has still been pining for Peter all this time, even for grown-up, hairy Robin Williams-looking Peter.
What the film really needed was a character Peter could introduce Neverland to, whether it be his wife (who just gets left behind for the whole adventure) or his kids. Instead it gives us an amnesiac Peter rediscovering Neverland which, for me, didn't work at all.
Of course the classic Disney animated feature would be the first stop after
Hook, as it seems to be what Spielberg's film is most directly referencing. The cartoon is, point blank, gorgeous. It's is so vibrantly coloured and so lovingly illustrated that it's clear this was a labour of love for the folks at Disney at the time.
I noted in the opening credits that the film was based off a play, which was the first that I'd learned that Peter Pan was indeed first scripted as a play by J.M. Barrie in 1904 ("Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up") and only later adapted into a novel in 1911 ("Peter and Wendy"). The credits also held the tidbit that the right to Peter Pan were (and still are) held by the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (though it seems anyone can use Peter Pan without oversight, as if in Public Domain, royalties must be paid to the hospital by special concession).
The credits also play under a groan inducing choral crooning of the like that was surely outdated even by 1953's standards, and there's a few other sing-songs in the feature that don't quite hold up to the high standards of songs featured in Disney films.
As we saw in Hook, and we'll see again in Peter Pan and Wendy, here the Darling children, John and Michael are playing Peter Pan and pirates in their room. It's this weird part of these stories where Peter Pan is already a legend, and not something new to be discovered, and I don't quite care for it. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and adds nothing to the story. In the cartoon though, it hints that Wendy has been having visits with Peter on a regular basis, and so it makes sense when her father is telling her it is time to grow up that Peter looks to remove her from that threat.
It seems like the story is meant to focus on Wendy's turmoil over growing up, with "the boy who never grew up" both her guide and her cautionary tale, but once taken to Neverland, the perspective of the tale shifts quite heavily to adventure centering around Peter, such that we lose most of the narrative thrust on what Wendy is going through.
Tinkerbell is great in the film, Peter's faerie companion who gets immensely jealous of Wendy, as does every other young lady in Neverland, from the mermaids to Tiger Lily, the daughter of the (*cough*) "Indian Chief". (Ok, those are the only other female characters in the film, and they're all gaga for Peter who doesn't seem to have the time of day for girls or kisses.
There's an aspect of this story where Peter's only relation to women is looking for a mother figure, for which he presents Wendy to the Lost Boys as. It's weird, and confusing and oedipal in so many ways that I'm sure there's many an essay written around it.
The use of indigenous people on Neverland basically intones that they are fantastical beings like elves and orcs, and not real people and culture. Peter and the boys like to appropriate that culture, and the godawful reductive stereotype that they're presented as here is really hard to stomach.
The Captain Hook of the joint is, again, a highlight. Hans Conreid (in a performance very much coopted by Hoffman for Hook) delivers a vocal performance that make Hook far more charming than insidious. He is a likeable guy, but can be totally callous when the time comes. The rivalry with the alligator leads to some intense Looney Tunes-inspired slapstick which is both delightful and somewhat out of step with the rest of the story. It's a real mixed-bag of a production.
But that bag only gets more mixed up in
Peter Pan and Wendy, David Lowrey's follow-up to the assured and magical
The Green Knight. Disney has been on a decade-long kick of turning their classic (and even not-so-classic) animated features into live action versions, with, at best middling results, and this is not a best-case scenario. In many respects, Lowrey seemed to be keen on re-imagining the Peter Pan story into something more Wendy-forward, but then seemed to have to compromise that with being beholden to scenes and sequences from its animated predecessor.
From the film's opening moments it shows this Wendy is much more free-spirited and action oriented as she gets in the mix of John and Michael's bedroom swordplay, taking a sword of her own, until a mirror is smashed (no talk of 7 years bad luck) and father (Alan Tudyk) comes down hard on her. In the animated version, Wendy is the great bedtime storyteller that Peter wants to bring back to the Lost Boys as mother, but in this version, Peter's been listening to Mary Darling (Molly Parker) tell bedtime stories. It's because Wendy is sad that she's getting sent off to a boarding school that she proactively asks Peter to take her with him to Neverland.
This Neverland, like all the Neverlands, is a small, unimpressive island in the middle of a great sea. As a fantasy retreat, I just don't get the appeal. Here, at least, the Lost Boys aren't all boys at all, which I liked tremendously... or would like if they had any distinctive personalities to speak of at all. At least in Hook there were a handful of the lost boys who had prominence and screen presence. Here, they're basically crowd fill.
Jude Law plays Captain James T. Hook (ok, I added the "T") and... well.... Look, Law is a great actor, but he's a pretty serious one. He can be playful, and charming, but his playful charm is always filled with different levels of menace (see A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Star Wars: The Skeleton Crew), what he's not great at is giving over to anything overtly comedic or silly, and, in my very limited and recent experience with the Peter Pan mythos, that is absolutely what Hook needs. As such, Law's Hook comes off as too intimidating, too scary. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys shouldn't be frightened of what are essentially bumbling pirates (clearly the animated Hook and crew was part of the inspiration for Our Flag Means Death...like a total prototype) led by a Captain with a clock phobia.
In any of these adaptations the flying sequences have all been pretty ho-hum though each of them have a moment or two that comes close to grandeur (if never fully obtaining it). Here, the flying is perhaps overextended, basking too much in it, but I did like the visual of flying through Big Ben, the clock separating into component pieces intoning that they've left our reality and are traversing to another. But the effects of Peter Pan and Wendy vary drastically, from very impressive to utter ass. I have no issues at all casting a Black actress (Yara Shahidi) as Tinkerbell, but it's the way in which they shot her, the cut-tos, the center-of-frame framing, the clearly Volume soundstage backdrops...it's all really ugly and the effect is off putting. I appreciate that they kept her dialogue as a tinkling bell, but they took away Tink's swooning and territorial aggression towards Peter which was, I have to say, one of her charms in the animated feature, and in the 1924 silent film as well. There's not a scene that I can think of in this production where Tinkerbell works well, and it's all a matter in how they decided to employ her visually (again, nothing to do with skin colour and all to do with cheap special effects that look more Disney Channel than Disney Motion Picture).
The biggest change of the Pan story (besides the total elimination of the "Indians" as residents of Neverland - Tiger Lily is instead another Lost Boy ... I think...) is in Hook's story. The reveal here is the Peter and Hook used to be mates, best friends, Lost Boys forever, until James decided he wanted to go seek out his mom, and Peter would not accept him back. James did not find his mom, and he lost his friend, and his youth. No wonder he's so bitter and angry. I actually liked this shift to the story, it really did add something, it's just a shame it's largely an ugly, muddled mess of a production that truly doesn't work. If there's a signature style to COVID lockdown-era productions, this one hoists it in spades. Everything seems so sparse, and full of hesitation. I really would have liked to have seen Lowery's vision for Pan without meeting the needs of Disney.
Of the versions of Peter Pan I watched, the 1924 Paramount production, available in multiple forms on YouTube, was perhaps my favourite. Maybe it was because it was a silent picture and I could put it on double-speed and not lose anything at all about it, and for me, shorter Pan is better Pan... but also the practicality of it all, the hybrid between early studio cinema and stage production really gave it a feeling that I was watching something closest to its roots.
I'm not a lover of silent films, generally, but I was rather engaged by this, I feel moreso than I have been about any of the other Pan films. Weirdly, because of the title cards in the film, I had to pay more attention to it, rather than distract myself with IMDB deep dives or looking up trivia (or playing a game) on my phone while the film runs its course.
Nana, the Darling family's Saint Bernard which also doubles as the children's nanny, is played by a man in a dog suit. It's not convincingly real in the slightest, but for 1924 it's pretty great (except those eyes). Nana performs all sorts of actions, like drawing and bath and giving the children their medicine, which are clearly tasks above and beyond what an real-world dog can do. I thought the ever-active Nana in the animated Disney version (the best character in the film) was purely a Disney creation for comedic purposes, but no, it's clear it was in Barrie's source material. Lowery didn't bother with much Nana business at all in his movie and Hook, being sequel decades in the future meant Nana wasn't around anymore.
Though used sparingly, I think Tinkerbell is incredible in this film. For the few up-close scenes, they created maximized sets to look like she was interacting with giant drawer handles or window latches, and in other scenes the compositing is astonishing (any time I see compositing in a silent film I'm always astounded, first by just the sheer ingenuity in the face of limited technology, and second because it almost always looks fantastic).
In this telling of the story, Wendy is once again running away from growing up, and Peter is her escape. As in most versions, its clear she likes Peter and, as always, wants to give him plenty of kisses. And just like in most versions Peter is curious about kissing, but where later films try to play it as youthful romance, here Peter seems to be confusing romantic versus maternal. All throughout he debates with Wendy about whether she's a mother figure to him or something else...and he's always on the side Wendy being his mom (except when he's not). The oedipal confusion is especially high in this version, as is Wendy's vexed feelings about Neverland. It is an escape from the growing up her father is charging her with, but if she's only going to become a mother to all the Lost Boys then isn't that just another form of growing up too soon?
Peter here is played by a woman, Elisabeth "Betty" Bronson, as was traditional for stage versions of Peter Pan. I really would like a version of Peter Pan that plays with the gender fluidity of Peter, and tells a more queer story of puppy love. It's subtext that should have been there this whole time but seems to have been cleared out of every major version of Peter Pan where a male lead stars.
This version also has "Indian" inhabitants of the island, but I dare say (besides my earlier comment of envisioning indigenous culture as something mythical) they're role is far less ugly than in the animated version, in no small part thanks to it being a silent movie. Their role is much more limited as well, but, unfortunately they're also brutally slaughtered by the pirates when watching over the Lost Boys encampment, so they're definitely not treated well. In fact there's certainly more death and violence in this version than any of the others I saw (the Lost Boys, including young Michael get real busy stabbing pirates dead).
This silent version moves the story's framing base from London to...somewhere in America, and along the way makes young Michael into a rah-rah-America boy, who at times elicits yelps of pro-America patriotism that, somehow, remains quaint, I guess. At one point, the boys (all the Lost Boys included) start singing "My Country 'tis of Thee" (how do the Lost Boys know that song)a, and in another scene after the boys defeat the pirates, they lower the Jolly Roger and raise the Stars and Stripes (where'd it come from....? Magic?).
"The Lost Boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when their nurses aren't looking," Peter says, and to me, there's an aspect to Peter Pan that has me wondering if metaphorically Neverland is meant as some form of afterlife, that the Lost Boys are dead children. It's a theory that doesn't hold water in the actual execution of these stories, but it is said that Peter Pan was based on Barrie's brother who died at 14 and his mother would say he was the boy who never grew up.
One of the aspects of Peter Pan that isn't always consistent is that the actor who plays Captain Cook *sometimes* also plays Wendy and the boys' father. I'm not really sure whether that's just casting simplification or, if there's supposed to be some thematic connection there, well I'm not seeing it, especially since Wendy barely interacts with Cook at all. This is true of 2003's Peter Pan from Australian director P.J. Hogan for Universal/Columbia where Jason Isaacs plays both roles.
I started watching this version of Peter Pan, and, honestly, think I was enjoying it more than any of the other retellings, since as a live action translation it was really effectively threading the line between live action and cartoon, and it was setting Wendy up in a way I found lacking in most other interpretations. But I only got maybe 20 minutes in before I was pulled away and I can't say I've found the urge to go back to it. My trip into Neverland is over and it's likely to be a while before I'm ready to go back.
[For the record, my favourite all-time Peter Pan adaptation is the legal musical Michael Bluth starred in as a child in Arrested Development.]
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