High-flying tale just peters out
Pan (out of 4) Starring Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara, Garrett Hedlund, Kathy Burke and Levi Miller. Directed by Joe Wright. At GTA theatres. 111 minutes. PG
It appears all involved had a grand ol’ time making Pan, the latest and loopiest retelling of the story of Peter Pan. Too bad for the audience, though.
“This isn’t the story you’ve heard before,” we’re advised at the outset, and don’t you dare doubt it. Delightful to look at yet baffling to contemplate, it’s a feast for the eyes but famine for the brain.
Director Joe Wright lets his freak flag fly, in ways he apparently couldn’t for his more sober literary adaptations Atonement and Pride & Prejudice.
He and screenwriter Jason Fuchs obviously didn’t feel bound by much more than the character names in their frantic imagining of a prequel to the J.M. Barrie classic novel about the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
The actors, done up like Christmas baubles by excitable production designers and costumers, proceed as if good taste and restraint are impediments to fantasy.
Hugh Jackman’s pirate Blackbeard looks like a Mad Max villain designed by Terry Gilliam, with his shaved head, Snidely Whiplash moustache and flying ship.
Brains rattle as he and his Neverland stooges are weirdly introduced by way of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Rooney Mara’s warrior Tiger Lily is done up with every hue of the rainbow, perhaps to deflect criticism that an actress of colour wasn’t chosen for a role that Barrie wrote as a Native American princess.
Garrett Hedlund’s James Hook is an Indiana Jones wannabe in dress and voice, missing only the whip but still retaining both hands.
Kathy Burke is almost unrecognizable as Mother Barnabas, the greedy nun who operates a child-snatching operation masquerading as an orphanage in the London of the Second World War.
Then there’s Aussie newcomer Levi Miller as Peter, an energetic lad who at least is within shouting distance of Barrie’s original concept.
Of course, there’s no law that says you can’t take liberties with a source story, as Steven Spielberg happily demonstrated in Hook, the 1991 film that among other things helped introduce Gwyneth Paltrow to an unsuspecting world.
But some kind of narrative clarity would have been nice, something more than the tired Wizard of Oz steal about home being “not where you come from, but where you make it.”
After driving us crazy for nearly two hours, Pan just peters out.