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selenakPartly because of Peter Pan related discussions with bimo, I brushed up on my Barrie, watched Andrew Birkin's tv three parter The Lost Boys (BBC, 1978) about Barrie and the Lwelelyn Davies boys, read Birkin's documentary book "J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys" and rewatched Finding Neverland from 2005. The differences are instructive, and it's the youngest product that feels the most dated, and, in terms of the subject it tackles, the least challenging.
Of course, by itself, if you take it as a work of fiction and disconnect it from its rl inspiration, Finding Neverland is fine, a well made "weepie", as they used to call them, and I don't mean that in a negative way. Perhaps a bit too polished: lonely artist in empty marriage and professional flop just behind him meets enchanting family with grief of their own which revitalizes and inspires him, empty marriage dissolves, grief is overcome and happiness is found despite some disapproval from other characters, new work of art is being created, new tragedy strikes, has Sylvia's dying is perfectly coordinated with the world premiere of Peter Pan, deathbed reconciliation between our hero and her disapproving mother, moving final scene between hero and son of heroine who was the child mainly focused on in the story. If the scene crosses the line into mawkishness at one dialogue point when our hero tells the boy that his mother is in Neverland now and if the boy believes enough, he can find her, the performances throughout, including this scene, are well enough to sell you on it while watching. The film stars Johnny Depp at the height of his popularity (it was shot between Pirates movies) and despite the very premise being a man with an inner child, he gives a restrained performance. Kate Winslet is great as the heroine. And this was the first thing I saw Freddie Highmore in, who is currently playing teenage Norman Bates in Bates Motel and here gives a remarkable sensitive and yet unsentimental performance as as the child Peter Llewelyn Davies.
So much for Finding Neverland if everyone depicted had been invented. As a work of fiction "inspired by a true story", as the credits put it, it's a breathtaking example of Hollywoodian brushing out and bowlderizing anything that could be the least bit uncomfortable or disquieting for the audience. Some of the movie's changes and trimmings are a matter of pace and economy, granted; the movie gives you the impression of taking place in less than a year, as opposed the decade that passed between Barrie's initial contact with the Davies clan and Sylvia's death (this also avoids having to use several different actors for the boys), and Peter Pan, the play, premiered (without any big "will it fail?" angst before hand) years before Sylvia died, and it's unsurprising the movie didn't want to put the big event in the middle as opposed to the end. Even reducing the number of boys from five to four could be defended in the name of character focus (it's not like little Nico would have added much to the tale). But the majority of changes are about something else altogether. Starting with the externals: Johnny Depp is of course much taller than the barely five feet size Barrie; he also doesn't bother with Barrie's mustache, and the only scene where he smoked a pipe (Barrie was a chain smoker) got deleted (it's among the dvd extras, and the director cheerfully explains he didn't like his main character smoking pipes). Barrie's chronic cough is non existent.
Moving on to internal matters, there are the character deletions changing the entire dynamics: most obviously Arthur Llewelyn Davies, who, far from being dead, was alive for seven more years after Barrie first met his boys in Kensington Gardens, and who was less than thrilled at being constantly ursurped in his sons' attentions but put up with it anyway. (Birkin thinks Mr. Darling is Barrie's take on Arthur, which tells you something.) Arthur then died horribly, painfully and lengthily of bone cancer in the face - I think sarcoma is the English term? -; part of the jaw had to be removed, which did no good because the tumor had already spread to the other half of the face, and he couldn't even talk towards the end. Both in rl and in Finding Neverland, Sylvia years later also dies of cancer, but hers is the telegenic type conveyed by a few coughs; though I suspect the deletion of Arthur wasn't solely due to not wanting the targeted family audience to watch someone minus their jaw but more about wanting to remove any doubts whatsoever about Barrie's motives. Wanting to be there for a widow and her fatherless sons being quite different from taking over a family which already has a father (and one who isn't stern and distant but gentle and loving). Not to mention that while the relationship between Barrie and Sylvia Lewelelyn Davies in Finding Neverland remains strictly platonic, it's played as a understated romance; since it's established early on Barrie's marriage is over in all but in name (btw, in fairness, Mary still isn't a negative figure), I suspect the producers thought the audience would have no problem with that on Mary Barrie's account but would have if Sylvia were presented as a happily married woman.
Also deleted: Mary Hodgson, the boys' nanny, who went on to raise them together with Barrie (despite the two of them being hostile towards and jealous of each other) after both parents were dead. Partly, I guess, because the spot of "woman disapproving of Barrie" is already taken by Sylvia's mother Emma du Maurier. But partly, I suspect, also due to Sylvia's characterisation, which in Finding Neverland is that of the ideal mother. I can just see the producer who declares that Sylvia letting a nanny do a considerable part of the day to day mothering would be off putting for a modern audience. (Meanwhile, Birkin quotes a Davies aquaintance who cattily remarks that Sylvia wore her beautiful children like a necklace to off set her own beauty but left the cuddling and the messy clean ups to Arthur and the Nanny.)
And finally, there's the question of sex. Finding Neverland makes it clear that Barrie and his wife have separate bedrooms and have done for a while, and there's one scene in which a friend (who's supposed to be Arthur Conan Doyle, actually, though you have to wait for the credits to find out) tells Barrie there's been gossip about both him and Sylvia and him and the boys. Barrie has an appropriate "how dare they?" reaction. This is the only scene which tackles what is the most vexed issue of the entire decades long relationships. The refutation is convincing within Finding Neverland because the movie never lets Barrie say anything that wouldn't today be acceptable as something a kind adult with a gift for playing with children would say to them. For the same reason, the question as to whether the intense emotional focus he has on them is good or bad doesn't pose itself. The movie gives the starring role among the boys to Peter (which is another departure from history because while Barrie loved all five, his favourites were George and Michael; in this case, I think the choice is simply because Peter is Pan's namesake) who is presented as more openly grieving for his dead father than the other three and at first refusing to join the games, and movie!Barrie does the very family movie friendly thing of drawing the boy out of his grief. (Another reason why killing Arthur ahead of schedule changes the dynamics so much.) Their interactions certainly never have dialogue like the following examples from Barrie's novel A Little White Bird, the first of his works inspired by the Davies boys, in which a barely fictionalized George Llewelyn Davies shows up under the name "David" (more about the significance of this name in a moment):
I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair. Then the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded his head about six times.
That was the prettiest of all his exploits.
Not to mention:
"'Why, David,' said I, sitting up, 'do you want to come into my bed?'
"'Mother said I wasn't to want it unless you wanted it first,' he squeaked."
As Anthony Lane put it in the New Yorker about how the initial "Barrie meets George and Jack and baby Peter in Kensington Gardens with their Nanny in 1898, befriends them" scenario would be unthinkable today because no parents would react as Sylvia and Arthur did: To our panicked eyes, such a relationship would be unthinkable—or, if thought about, nipped in the bud. We assume that a strange man, nearing forty, in a public place can offer only one thing to children still in knickerbockers, and that is harm. We would call the police, or, at least, call our children away. If we discovered the man to be a celebrity, we might call our lawyers, or, if we were feeling spiteful, the newspapers. And, if we were later to read what he wrote about our children, in an account so lightly ornamented as hardly to count as fiction, we might not be responsible for our actions.
Yes, well. There are a lot of headline making reasons why mentality changed like this. Which is probably why Andrew Birkin's The Lost Boys could only be made in the late 70s.
Birkin, as he narrates in his foreword to the documentary book written as an addendum to the tv series, came across the subject of Barrie almost by accident; he was charged to adapt Peter Pan into a musical, fell in love with Mia Farrow who was starring as Peter, wanted to justify his presence on the set after the script was done and thus turned himself into a J. M. Barrie expert. The lengthy dedication of the play to The Five where Barrie wrote "I suppose I always knew I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all Peter is - the spark I got from you" made him curious about the Llewelyn Davies boys, and what became of them. He researched and saw the grounds for a movie. The he hit research gold, because the youngest of the brothers, Nico Llewelyn Davies, was still alive, made contact, and proved to be willing and able not only to be available for intense correspondance and interviews but also to provide Birkin with the six unpublished volumes of family papers his brother Peter Llewelyn Davies had put together and annotated extensively (nicknaming the collection "The Morgue" and getting as far as his brother George's death before depression caught up with him again, and he committed suicide). Faced with the sheer wealth of material, Birkin changed his plan from film to tv three parter, and the result certainly proved him more than right. And it's something that would definitely not be made today.
The Lost Boys, the tv miniseries, is very 70s British tv. Excellent actors - above all Ian Holm as J. M. Barrie -, no expensive locations (Kensington Gardens, of course, and Black Lake in Scotland, but there are no sweeping landscape shots, and when Barrie takes the boys to Paris or Switzerland, we never leave hotel rooms), though faithful recreation of the interiors (Nico provided the original paintings from Barrie's flat in Adelphi Terrace), nearly no music (music is heard in the title sequence and the end credit sequence, but aside from the occasional song of the day, nearly nowhere else), leisurely narrative pace. (The series covers 30 years in all. The first episode ends with Arthur - Tim Piggott-Smith in a rare non villainous role! - getting his jaw removed, the second with Sylvia's death, and the third with the aftermath to Michael's death.) There are voice overs - mostly Barrie's (from his actual notebooks), because the way he keeps using his rl encounters and problems as raw material for fiction - being sharply analytical and harsh about his fictional alter egos - is part of the characterisation, but later also from the adult boys' letters). And there's no "last time..." in the second and third episode. And you have two actors per episode playing each of the Llewelyn Davies boys because of the time passing. Birkin early on was told by a BBC producer to keep the number of child actors minimal because of the obvious difficulties, and immediately said this wasn't an option in this particular project - the interaction between Barrie and the boys being the heart of the story. The producer gave in.
Because of the far longer screen time, there is more developing relationship room all around. (For example, the failure of Barrie's marriage, which isn't solely due to one reason but several - Barrie's lack of emotional availability to Mary being a greater problem than them having no sex, and his chronically underestimating her wish to do something, to contribute. The sequence in which it finally breaks apart are also a great example of Barrie's moodswings. (Short version, after Barrie found out Mary has a (younger than her) lover: B: How could you? M: Seriously? B: But scandal? M: Yay scandal! B: I'll forgive you if you give him up! M: "I don't want your forgiveness, I want a divorce." (that was a direct quote.) B: Okay, I realise this is all my fault and I should never gave gotten married. Sorry. M: Thank God we're able to part civily, I loved you once. B: But scandal! I changed my mind. Give him up. Don't leave me alone! I can't stand being alone. M: Divorce. B: No. M: If you don't give me a divorce, I'll ask for an annulment based on non-consumation. B: Divorce!)
Ian Holm's Barrie is a far more intense and paradoxical character than Depp's was ever allowed to be. Also damaged himself, of course; Barrie had his own childhood trauma, which both The Lost Boys and Finding Neverland let him narrate to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, but the way they do it illustrates the differences in miniature form. What happened to Barrie as a child was that his older brother David died, and his mother never got over it. She took to her bed for more than a year. Young Barrie made himself into David's replica to give her a reason to come back to the rest of the family - including wearing David's cloths, training himself to sound and whistle like David, and his mother told him that he couldn't really be David because David at least would never grow up and stay the boy he was, whereas Jim would become a man. (Obvious implication for future famous work is obvious.) In both The Lost Boys and Finding Neverland, as I said, the audience learns this as Barrie tells it to Sylvia. In Finding Neverland, however, this ends with Sylvia being sympathetic and deeply sorry for Barrie. In The Lost Boys, it ends with Sylvia being touched and sympathetic to Barrie, proceding to start and share this new information with Arthur who surprises her by quoting the rest of the story from memory, because, he points out, Barrie already published it, in his book about his mother, Margaret Ogelvie, wryly commenting that at least he's now profiting handsomely from his pain. Ouch.
(The writer in Barrie constanly turning people into stories and that this isn't without moral ambiguity is an ongoing theme in the series.)
As for the "did he or didn't he?" question: Nico Lwelelyn Davies told Andrew Birkin "I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for anyone - man, woman, adult or child. He was an innocent", and Birkin does go with Barrie as asexual. (In an interview on the dvd, he also says that he thinks "repressed pedophile" is a wrong description because as opposed to Lewis Carroll, Barrie didn't lose interest in his child friends when they grew up. If anything, he became clingier and more intense.) But he also includes these disturbing pieces from A Little White Bird, and his Barrie certainly is obsessively in love with George and Michael. At the same time, you can see why the boys initially all adore him. (Jack would later resent him for ursurping Arthur. Peter was eternally torn between resentment and affection.) It's not just the lack of talking down, or the exciting games, it's that Holm's Barrie - whose definition of an ideal child included it being "heartless" because he saw and indeed was drawn to the casual cruelty children are capable of, the self centred ness, too - is as opposed to Depp's Barrie not eternally patient, if the kids are short tempered, then so is he towards them, he has moods and is intriguing to them because he has to be wooed and persuaded as often he does it to them. One of the most disquieting and powerful scenes is in a Swiss hotel where he and Michael are playing cards and Michael tries to get him to admit that he, Michael, is Barrie's favourite.
Of the boys, George and Michael are the most fleshed out for obvious reasons, Jack is the voice of opposition from the second episode onwards, Nico is a nice kid, and Peter is the pleast fleshed out, basically only getting one character scene (when WWI ends and he as a shell shocked soldier has a terse converstion with Barrie about what death is really like). Most of the tragedies that befall the Davies family aren't Barrie's fault (cancer killing Arthur and Sylvia, George dying as a soldier in WWI), but with Michael it's ambiguous because Barrie's inability to let him go and jealousy of Michael's obvious lover are shown, and Michael ends up committing suicide. At the same time, Michael also gets a scene where he fiercely defends Barrie to one of his friends who calls their relationship unhealthy, plus George, the other favourite, is the most cheerfully balanced type imaginable before dying tragically on the battlefield.
(The friend in question later became notorious. It was the same Bob Boothby who ended up as a bisexual Tory politician, having affairs with Dorothy MacMillan and one of the Kray Twins at the same time. But I only found that this was him when I read the documentary book.)
(Barrie's last letter to George before George died, which Birkin quotes partially on screen and in full in the book, is as anguishedly fatherly as you could wish, and heart rendering not just because the recipient had only a few days more to live but because Barrie railing against war, calling it monstrous when such a view wasn't yet accepted.)
Reading the book, it's evident how much of the dialogue was Birkin using primary source material, which is why I've seen the three parter called a docudrama, despite the fact it never leaves the fiction format. (I.e. there are no interrupting interview scenes.) It's as unjudgmental a presentation of an intense and disquieting story as possible. The book, too, plus it provides details that didn't make it on screen about the various stages of Peter Pan the play, such as the fact that in the first draft, there was no Captain Hook ("He didn't need a villain because he already had one: 'P(eter) a demon boy (villain of story)'") and that when Hook did exist, Barrie originally wanted him to be played by an actress the same way Peter was, with the actress doubling as Mrs. Darling, the mother. It wasn't until Gerald du Maurier (brother of Sylvia, father of Daphne the novelist) was cast and insisted on playing both Mr. Darling and Hook that this particular doubling came into being (and because a tradition since). Giving the mother, not the father an evil alter ego is intriguing in the light of Barrie's mixed feelings about his own mother, but possibly also Sylvia.
All in all: not a story that will let you go easily. As it should be. "You're old", says one of the boys to Barrie at one point, "but you're not grown up", and that is both the story and the tragedy - for everyone involved.
bimo, I brushed up on my Barrie, watched Andrew Birkin's tv three parter The Lost Boys (BBC, 1978) about Barrie and the Lwelelyn Davies boys, read Birkin's documentary book "J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys" and rewatched Finding Neverland from 2005. The differences are instructive, and it's the youngest product that feels the most dated, and, in terms of the subject it tackles, the least challenging. Of course, by itself, if you take it as a work of fiction and disconnect it from its rl inspiration, Finding Neverland is fine, a well made "weepie", as they used to call them, and I don't mean that in a negative way. Perhaps a bit too polished: lonely artist in empty marriage and professional flop just behind him meets enchanting family with grief of their own which revitalizes and inspires him, empty marriage dissolves, grief is overcome and happiness is found despite some disapproval from other characters, new work of art is being created, new tragedy strikes, has Sylvia's dying is perfectly coordinated with the world premiere of Peter Pan, deathbed reconciliation between our hero and her disapproving mother, moving final scene between hero and son of heroine who was the child mainly focused on in the story. If the scene crosses the line into mawkishness at one dialogue point when our hero tells the boy that his mother is in Neverland now and if the boy believes enough, he can find her, the performances throughout, including this scene, are well enough to sell you on it while watching. The film stars Johnny Depp at the height of his popularity (it was shot between Pirates movies) and despite the very premise being a man with an inner child, he gives a restrained performance. Kate Winslet is great as the heroine. And this was the first thing I saw Freddie Highmore in, who is currently playing teenage Norman Bates in Bates Motel and here gives a remarkable sensitive and yet unsentimental performance as as the child Peter Llewelyn Davies.
So much for Finding Neverland if everyone depicted had been invented. As a work of fiction "inspired by a true story", as the credits put it, it's a breathtaking example of Hollywoodian brushing out and bowlderizing anything that could be the least bit uncomfortable or disquieting for the audience. Some of the movie's changes and trimmings are a matter of pace and economy, granted; the movie gives you the impression of taking place in less than a year, as opposed the decade that passed between Barrie's initial contact with the Davies clan and Sylvia's death (this also avoids having to use several different actors for the boys), and Peter Pan, the play, premiered (without any big "will it fail?" angst before hand) years before Sylvia died, and it's unsurprising the movie didn't want to put the big event in the middle as opposed to the end. Even reducing the number of boys from five to four could be defended in the name of character focus (it's not like little Nico would have added much to the tale). But the majority of changes are about something else altogether. Starting with the externals: Johnny Depp is of course much taller than the barely five feet size Barrie; he also doesn't bother with Barrie's mustache, and the only scene where he smoked a pipe (Barrie was a chain smoker) got deleted (it's among the dvd extras, and the director cheerfully explains he didn't like his main character smoking pipes). Barrie's chronic cough is non existent.
Moving on to internal matters, there are the character deletions changing the entire dynamics: most obviously Arthur Llewelyn Davies, who, far from being dead, was alive for seven more years after Barrie first met his boys in Kensington Gardens, and who was less than thrilled at being constantly ursurped in his sons' attentions but put up with it anyway. (Birkin thinks Mr. Darling is Barrie's take on Arthur, which tells you something.) Arthur then died horribly, painfully and lengthily of bone cancer in the face - I think sarcoma is the English term? -; part of the jaw had to be removed, which did no good because the tumor had already spread to the other half of the face, and he couldn't even talk towards the end. Both in rl and in Finding Neverland, Sylvia years later also dies of cancer, but hers is the telegenic type conveyed by a few coughs; though I suspect the deletion of Arthur wasn't solely due to not wanting the targeted family audience to watch someone minus their jaw but more about wanting to remove any doubts whatsoever about Barrie's motives. Wanting to be there for a widow and her fatherless sons being quite different from taking over a family which already has a father (and one who isn't stern and distant but gentle and loving). Not to mention that while the relationship between Barrie and Sylvia Lewelelyn Davies in Finding Neverland remains strictly platonic, it's played as a understated romance; since it's established early on Barrie's marriage is over in all but in name (btw, in fairness, Mary still isn't a negative figure), I suspect the producers thought the audience would have no problem with that on Mary Barrie's account but would have if Sylvia were presented as a happily married woman.
Also deleted: Mary Hodgson, the boys' nanny, who went on to raise them together with Barrie (despite the two of them being hostile towards and jealous of each other) after both parents were dead. Partly, I guess, because the spot of "woman disapproving of Barrie" is already taken by Sylvia's mother Emma du Maurier. But partly, I suspect, also due to Sylvia's characterisation, which in Finding Neverland is that of the ideal mother. I can just see the producer who declares that Sylvia letting a nanny do a considerable part of the day to day mothering would be off putting for a modern audience. (Meanwhile, Birkin quotes a Davies aquaintance who cattily remarks that Sylvia wore her beautiful children like a necklace to off set her own beauty but left the cuddling and the messy clean ups to Arthur and the Nanny.)
And finally, there's the question of sex. Finding Neverland makes it clear that Barrie and his wife have separate bedrooms and have done for a while, and there's one scene in which a friend (who's supposed to be Arthur Conan Doyle, actually, though you have to wait for the credits to find out) tells Barrie there's been gossip about both him and Sylvia and him and the boys. Barrie has an appropriate "how dare they?" reaction. This is the only scene which tackles what is the most vexed issue of the entire decades long relationships. The refutation is convincing within Finding Neverland because the movie never lets Barrie say anything that wouldn't today be acceptable as something a kind adult with a gift for playing with children would say to them. For the same reason, the question as to whether the intense emotional focus he has on them is good or bad doesn't pose itself. The movie gives the starring role among the boys to Peter (which is another departure from history because while Barrie loved all five, his favourites were George and Michael; in this case, I think the choice is simply because Peter is Pan's namesake) who is presented as more openly grieving for his dead father than the other three and at first refusing to join the games, and movie!Barrie does the very family movie friendly thing of drawing the boy out of his grief. (Another reason why killing Arthur ahead of schedule changes the dynamics so much.) Their interactions certainly never have dialogue like the following examples from Barrie's novel A Little White Bird, the first of his works inspired by the Davies boys, in which a barely fictionalized George Llewelyn Davies shows up under the name "David" (more about the significance of this name in a moment):
I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair. Then the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded his head about six times.
That was the prettiest of all his exploits.
Not to mention:
"'Why, David,' said I, sitting up, 'do you want to come into my bed?'
"'Mother said I wasn't to want it unless you wanted it first,' he squeaked."
As Anthony Lane put it in the New Yorker about how the initial "Barrie meets George and Jack and baby Peter in Kensington Gardens with their Nanny in 1898, befriends them" scenario would be unthinkable today because no parents would react as Sylvia and Arthur did: To our panicked eyes, such a relationship would be unthinkable—or, if thought about, nipped in the bud. We assume that a strange man, nearing forty, in a public place can offer only one thing to children still in knickerbockers, and that is harm. We would call the police, or, at least, call our children away. If we discovered the man to be a celebrity, we might call our lawyers, or, if we were feeling spiteful, the newspapers. And, if we were later to read what he wrote about our children, in an account so lightly ornamented as hardly to count as fiction, we might not be responsible for our actions.
Yes, well. There are a lot of headline making reasons why mentality changed like this. Which is probably why Andrew Birkin's The Lost Boys could only be made in the late 70s.
Birkin, as he narrates in his foreword to the documentary book written as an addendum to the tv series, came across the subject of Barrie almost by accident; he was charged to adapt Peter Pan into a musical, fell in love with Mia Farrow who was starring as Peter, wanted to justify his presence on the set after the script was done and thus turned himself into a J. M. Barrie expert. The lengthy dedication of the play to The Five where Barrie wrote "I suppose I always knew I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all Peter is - the spark I got from you" made him curious about the Llewelyn Davies boys, and what became of them. He researched and saw the grounds for a movie. The he hit research gold, because the youngest of the brothers, Nico Llewelyn Davies, was still alive, made contact, and proved to be willing and able not only to be available for intense correspondance and interviews but also to provide Birkin with the six unpublished volumes of family papers his brother Peter Llewelyn Davies had put together and annotated extensively (nicknaming the collection "The Morgue" and getting as far as his brother George's death before depression caught up with him again, and he committed suicide). Faced with the sheer wealth of material, Birkin changed his plan from film to tv three parter, and the result certainly proved him more than right. And it's something that would definitely not be made today.
The Lost Boys, the tv miniseries, is very 70s British tv. Excellent actors - above all Ian Holm as J. M. Barrie -, no expensive locations (Kensington Gardens, of course, and Black Lake in Scotland, but there are no sweeping landscape shots, and when Barrie takes the boys to Paris or Switzerland, we never leave hotel rooms), though faithful recreation of the interiors (Nico provided the original paintings from Barrie's flat in Adelphi Terrace), nearly no music (music is heard in the title sequence and the end credit sequence, but aside from the occasional song of the day, nearly nowhere else), leisurely narrative pace. (The series covers 30 years in all. The first episode ends with Arthur - Tim Piggott-Smith in a rare non villainous role! - getting his jaw removed, the second with Sylvia's death, and the third with the aftermath to Michael's death.) There are voice overs - mostly Barrie's (from his actual notebooks), because the way he keeps using his rl encounters and problems as raw material for fiction - being sharply analytical and harsh about his fictional alter egos - is part of the characterisation, but later also from the adult boys' letters). And there's no "last time..." in the second and third episode. And you have two actors per episode playing each of the Llewelyn Davies boys because of the time passing. Birkin early on was told by a BBC producer to keep the number of child actors minimal because of the obvious difficulties, and immediately said this wasn't an option in this particular project - the interaction between Barrie and the boys being the heart of the story. The producer gave in.
Because of the far longer screen time, there is more developing relationship room all around. (For example, the failure of Barrie's marriage, which isn't solely due to one reason but several - Barrie's lack of emotional availability to Mary being a greater problem than them having no sex, and his chronically underestimating her wish to do something, to contribute. The sequence in which it finally breaks apart are also a great example of Barrie's moodswings. (Short version, after Barrie found out Mary has a (younger than her) lover: B: How could you? M: Seriously? B: But scandal? M: Yay scandal! B: I'll forgive you if you give him up! M: "I don't want your forgiveness, I want a divorce." (that was a direct quote.) B: Okay, I realise this is all my fault and I should never gave gotten married. Sorry. M: Thank God we're able to part civily, I loved you once. B: But scandal! I changed my mind. Give him up. Don't leave me alone! I can't stand being alone. M: Divorce. B: No. M: If you don't give me a divorce, I'll ask for an annulment based on non-consumation. B: Divorce!)
Ian Holm's Barrie is a far more intense and paradoxical character than Depp's was ever allowed to be. Also damaged himself, of course; Barrie had his own childhood trauma, which both The Lost Boys and Finding Neverland let him narrate to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, but the way they do it illustrates the differences in miniature form. What happened to Barrie as a child was that his older brother David died, and his mother never got over it. She took to her bed for more than a year. Young Barrie made himself into David's replica to give her a reason to come back to the rest of the family - including wearing David's cloths, training himself to sound and whistle like David, and his mother told him that he couldn't really be David because David at least would never grow up and stay the boy he was, whereas Jim would become a man. (Obvious implication for future famous work is obvious.) In both The Lost Boys and Finding Neverland, as I said, the audience learns this as Barrie tells it to Sylvia. In Finding Neverland, however, this ends with Sylvia being sympathetic and deeply sorry for Barrie. In The Lost Boys, it ends with Sylvia being touched and sympathetic to Barrie, proceding to start and share this new information with Arthur who surprises her by quoting the rest of the story from memory, because, he points out, Barrie already published it, in his book about his mother, Margaret Ogelvie, wryly commenting that at least he's now profiting handsomely from his pain. Ouch.
(The writer in Barrie constanly turning people into stories and that this isn't without moral ambiguity is an ongoing theme in the series.)
As for the "did he or didn't he?" question: Nico Lwelelyn Davies told Andrew Birkin "I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for anyone - man, woman, adult or child. He was an innocent", and Birkin does go with Barrie as asexual. (In an interview on the dvd, he also says that he thinks "repressed pedophile" is a wrong description because as opposed to Lewis Carroll, Barrie didn't lose interest in his child friends when they grew up. If anything, he became clingier and more intense.) But he also includes these disturbing pieces from A Little White Bird, and his Barrie certainly is obsessively in love with George and Michael. At the same time, you can see why the boys initially all adore him. (Jack would later resent him for ursurping Arthur. Peter was eternally torn between resentment and affection.) It's not just the lack of talking down, or the exciting games, it's that Holm's Barrie - whose definition of an ideal child included it being "heartless" because he saw and indeed was drawn to the casual cruelty children are capable of, the self centred ness, too - is as opposed to Depp's Barrie not eternally patient, if the kids are short tempered, then so is he towards them, he has moods and is intriguing to them because he has to be wooed and persuaded as often he does it to them. One of the most disquieting and powerful scenes is in a Swiss hotel where he and Michael are playing cards and Michael tries to get him to admit that he, Michael, is Barrie's favourite.
Of the boys, George and Michael are the most fleshed out for obvious reasons, Jack is the voice of opposition from the second episode onwards, Nico is a nice kid, and Peter is the pleast fleshed out, basically only getting one character scene (when WWI ends and he as a shell shocked soldier has a terse converstion with Barrie about what death is really like). Most of the tragedies that befall the Davies family aren't Barrie's fault (cancer killing Arthur and Sylvia, George dying as a soldier in WWI), but with Michael it's ambiguous because Barrie's inability to let him go and jealousy of Michael's obvious lover are shown, and Michael ends up committing suicide. At the same time, Michael also gets a scene where he fiercely defends Barrie to one of his friends who calls their relationship unhealthy, plus George, the other favourite, is the most cheerfully balanced type imaginable before dying tragically on the battlefield.
(The friend in question later became notorious. It was the same Bob Boothby who ended up as a bisexual Tory politician, having affairs with Dorothy MacMillan and one of the Kray Twins at the same time. But I only found that this was him when I read the documentary book.)
(Barrie's last letter to George before George died, which Birkin quotes partially on screen and in full in the book, is as anguishedly fatherly as you could wish, and heart rendering not just because the recipient had only a few days more to live but because Barrie railing against war, calling it monstrous when such a view wasn't yet accepted.)
Reading the book, it's evident how much of the dialogue was Birkin using primary source material, which is why I've seen the three parter called a docudrama, despite the fact it never leaves the fiction format. (I.e. there are no interrupting interview scenes.) It's as unjudgmental a presentation of an intense and disquieting story as possible. The book, too, plus it provides details that didn't make it on screen about the various stages of Peter Pan the play, such as the fact that in the first draft, there was no Captain Hook ("He didn't need a villain because he already had one: 'P(eter) a demon boy (villain of story)'") and that when Hook did exist, Barrie originally wanted him to be played by an actress the same way Peter was, with the actress doubling as Mrs. Darling, the mother. It wasn't until Gerald du Maurier (brother of Sylvia, father of Daphne the novelist) was cast and insisted on playing both Mr. Darling and Hook that this particular doubling came into being (and because a tradition since). Giving the mother, not the father an evil alter ego is intriguing in the light of Barrie's mixed feelings about his own mother, but possibly also Sylvia.
All in all: not a story that will let you go easily. As it should be. "You're old", says one of the boys to Barrie at one point, "but you're not grown up", and that is both the story and the tragedy - for everyone involved.
