Peter’s friends
‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” was how JM Barrie introduced his most famous creation in the title of his 1904 stage play, and in Joe Wright’s Pan, that guarantee has pretty much held firm.
Technically, this is a prequel to Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, although for the most part, the kind of revamping, reverse engineering and postmodern horseplay that prequel-making normally entails are in short supply. In fact, aside from a couple of pirate singalongs to Nirvana and Ramones songs, Wright’s film is jubilantly uncool. Perhaps one of the best compliments you could pay it is that it could have been written 100 years ago.
The tone owes a little more to Jules Verne than it does Barrie, while its opening scenes, in a Blitz-battered London orphanage, are inescapably similar to early chapters of CS Lewis’s
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It was on the doorstep of this forbidding establishment that Peter (played by first-time actor Levi Miller) was left when he was a baby, and where he has since been under the care of Kathy Burke’s Mother Barnabas, the Miss Trunchbull-like gargoyle in charge. Every morning another few beds in the dormitory are empty, and Peter is convinced something funny is afoot. It transpires Mother Barnabas is selling the boys to a crew of Neverland pirates who need labour for their mining operation.
They swoop by every night in their flying galleon, drop through the skylights on ropes and pull the children from their beds like hunting spiders – an image of almost Roald Dahl-like shiveriness that Wright stages as a kind of lunatic circus act. One raid leads to what is Pan’s finest sequence: a bombastic pitched battle between the flying ship and Spitfires above the London rooftops. The cherry on this particular trifle is mission control, which is manned by a roomful of identical radio operators: think Kim Hunter in A Matter of Life and Death, but blonde and multiplied by 20.
Though Jason Fuchs’s script isn’t particularly beholden to Barrie’s work, some of its big ideas have been spun off from throwaway lines in it. The biggest one is its villain. In Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, John Darling reveals that Captain James Hook was once “Blackbeard’s bo’sun”, and so here we meet Blackbeard himself, who is played by a typically charismatic though not immediately recognisable Hugh Jackman, and is marshalling a search for life-sustaining fairy dust, or “pixum”, in Neverland’s mines.
With a thudding inevitability, it turns out a prophesy foretold all this: Peter is destined to lead a revolt against Blackbeard and free the children, using a latent ability to fly. This is all tied up neatly as the film progresses, but it seems unnecessary, particularly as part of the early charm of Peter’s character is his apparent lack of a preordained advantage beyond his nose for adventure. (A lovely, thoughtprovoking detail I wish the film had made a little more of: he’s dyslexic.)
Far more intriguing is the new fedora-wearing friend he makes down the mines, James Hook himself, played by Garrett Hedlund as a stack of matinee-idol tics: imagine Hedlund playing Armie Hammer playing Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones.
Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back. It’s a tale full of trapdoors, hidden switches and secret passageways. The phrase “an eight-year-old could have thought of it” sounds like it should be an insult. But it isn’t here.