"Wendy" Soars

I had a rough time getting myself situated into the world of Benh Zeitlin's debut feature, "Beasts of the Southern Wild," but once I finally did, I found the film a richly rewarding experience. Now, seven long years later, Zeitlin has finally made his follow-up film, "Wendy," an adaptation of J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." It's not nearly as strong as "Beasts," but I had no trouble connecting to this one.

Wendy (Devin France) and her brothers James (Gavin Naquin) and Douglas (Gage Naquin) are the children of a poor diner waitress, Angela Darling (Shay Walker). Growing up only seems to promise poverty and toil, so Wendy is easily convinced to jump aboard a mysterious passing train one night and run away from home, at the urging of a wild little boy named Peter (Yashua Mack). He brings Wendy and her brothers to a fantastic island where children stay young forever, unless they lose faith and begin to doubt. It's a paradise until, of course, it isn't.

The same earthy, chaotic, magical realist style Zeitlin used in "Beasts" has now been applied to "Wendy," along with the cultural context of the impoverished American South. So, instead of polite British children dressed in proper sleepwear, here the Darlings are a passel of scruffy rural Southern brats who make do with what little they have. The Lost Boys are no longer all boys, and feature a mix of races, with a dreadlocked African-American Peter in the lead. The more fundamental Peter Pan mythos has also been reworked heavily by Zeitlin and his sister Eliza. Neverland is now watched over by a supernatural creature called "The Mother," who manifests as a glowing sea creature, and is the source of the children's eternal youth. The adults on the island are all revealed to be former foundlings brought there by Peter, who fell from grace and grew old.

It's the style of the production that really sets it apart. Everything's been stripped down to bare essentials, and often props, costumes, and sets look like they've been repurposed from whatever the filmmakers had available. Neverland is full of wonders, including spouting geysers, underwater caves, and inviting wilderness, but it's a more grounded, natural place that has little in common with the CGI-heavy fantasy landscapes of studio-produced children's fare. The child actors, mostly nonprofessionals, are raw and energetic. Their acting is totally unpolished, but their genuine emotion and vividness are striking. The children's wild revels are all lovingly filmed by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, in a way that highlights all the tactile rough edges, but also leaves room for giddy moments of impossible cinema magic, like the kids playing with the geysers, or jumping to and from the moving trains.

The result is a grand piece of poetic cinema, with sweeping, dreamlike passages of lyrical childhood wonder, that do a fine job of selling us on this version of Peter Pan and Neverland. When the film tries to get into more typical narrative conflicts, however, it runs into some trouble. Everything is relayed in very grand, very earnest terms, and either you buy into the make-believe wholeheartedly, or you don't. And you either find the Terrence Malick style narration and stream-of-consciousness editing effective or you don't. "Wendy" should be lauded for tackling all the darker, pricklier parts of the Peter Pan story in a way that never feels compromised or reductive, but occasionally the film gets too bogged down by its ambitions, and too beholden to its source material. The ending in particular comes off as a little tone-deaf in its aggressive positivity.

And yet, I couldn't help falling a little in love with "Wendy," with it's overwhelming immature emotions, it's child-eye view of the great big world, and its sheer untamed vision. We've seen the Peter Pan story told so many times onscreen over the years, often through these elaborate productions that end up being counterproductive. And we've seen very talented artists update and explore the story in various ways, trying to expand on its fascinating themes and ideas to varying levels of success. "Wendy" is the first in a long time that really feels like something different. It doesn't achieve everything that it wants to, but it gets pretty close to being something great.

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