There’s a fine line between Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies, huh? Sure, one set of lawless preteen hooligans is just like another, huh? It’s all in the telling.
Speaking of telling, Wendy is a retelling of the Peter Pan tale in which the kids aren’t English, but instead a motley collection of American diner-trash hooligans and Caribbean orphans… this is the “real” story of Peter Pan, the conclusion tells us. The slight to J.M. Barrie is hardly the most troubling piece of this picture. Wendy re-imagined the telling of Peter Pan as “What if the kids were all dirt poor and we gave them nothing to do?” While I admit, this was a novel approach, it didn’t trigger my imagination quite like other iterations of this tale.
Picture a hole-in-the-wall diner right next to an open railyard (for atmosphere, I suppose). “Bob’s Burgers” would be a step up. The single mother who runs the place employs her youngest, a pre-teen named Wendy (Devin France), so the girl can get used to the idea of what her adult years will be like. Wendy’s older brothers James and Douglas and James and Douglas and James (Gage Naquin and Gavin Naquin) often frequent the restaurant to get some rasslin’ in.
Frustrated with her future of toothless squalor, Wendy literally hops a train for adventure. Douglas and James follow cuz they’re tools. And couched within the smoke atop the locomotive is the mysterious Peter Pan, a small, ragged imp with professional dreadlocks. Look, I didn’t expect Mary Martin or Robin Williams, but Yashua Mack strikes me less as Peter Pan and more as the mascot for the Jamaican bobsled team.
A vehicle or two later, all the kids end up wherever Lost Boy island is, which in this case is less the tropical paradise I envisioned and more a dead, vegetation-challenged plain with an active volcano. Don’t worry, the volcano is “Mother.” So is the giant glowing sea bass in the lagoon. Make up your mind, film. At this point, all narrative becomes free form. The mostly dialogue-challenged screenplay yields to several scenes of what may or may not be an unsuccessful game of tag.
Wendy joins a tradition of absurdly overrated films including Where the Wild Things Are and Beasts of the Southern Wild in which children simply scream and run around for no apparent reason. Writer/Director Benh Zeitlin reminded me again and again of why I didn’t like his critically acclaimed Beasts of the Southern Wild: as a director, he simply tells his actors, “go do stuff.” It’s like watching unattended children romping over the world’s nastiest playgrounds.
In retrospect, I wondered a great deal what the film was going for: A Peter Pan retelling on a shoestring budget … or a deeper understanding of childhood. The film finds itself uplifting, which is directly contradicted by pretty much everything that happened in it. Anybody bother considering the diner mother who lost her three children, huh? I cannot say I’ve ever seen a movie with children and magic designed less to appeal to children into magic. I’ll give the Zeitlins (Benh and sister Eliza who co-wrote) kudos for unique vision … but this vision sucks. The idea that it took Benh seven years to make this in the wake of Beasts is the saddest magic of all.
The irony of Neverland
Their leader absorbs comments, offhand
Sure, it’s much sweeter
To castigate Peter
But I’ve never seen Wendy get Panned
Rated PG-13, 112 Minutes
Director: Benh Zeitlin
Writer: Benh Zeitlin, Eliza Zeitlin
Genre: WTF?!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Pan-demics
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: J.M. Barrie
