KIDDING AROUND

Children vs, grown-ups in modern Peter Pan remix Wendy

Benh Zeitlin has very specific ideas about how a movie should look and feel, and what kind of story it tells. His first movie, the dreamy, impressionistic Beasts of the Southern Wild, explored themes of childhood resilience, the power of Nature, adult frailties, and community. All of which ideas resurface in his sophomore effort, Wendy.

As the title might imply, Wendy is the filmmaker's nod to the Peter Pan legend. It's a modern remix of the story of children who refuse to grow up, relocated to an uncharted island off the southern wild of America (it was shot largely in and around Louisiana bayou country), told not from the viewpoint of Peter, but from the little girl who, along with her two brothers, is caught up in his dream of eternal childhood.

Written by Zeitlin and his sister, Eliza Zeitlin, the movie stays grounded as much as possible in everyday reality — the kids' mom runs a diner at a whistle-stop on a freight train route; they hop a slow-moving train to "fly" away — kissed with a dash of magic realism. Their take on familiar Peter Pan tropes is often deftly done, from the fate of Lost Boys who outgrow Peter's tribe, to an eerie, unsettling origin story for Captain Hook.

But trying to shoehorn his unique sensibility into the existing structure of the Pan legend seems to dampen the audacious originality displayed in Zeitlin's earlier film. How well the story works may depend on whether or not you think the idea of never growing up is a good thing.

Young Wendy (Devin France) and her twin brothers, Douglas (Gage Naquin) and James (Gavin Naquin), have grown up in the diner run by their mama (Shay Walker). The train rattles by every night, and when they see a giggling figure scampering over the boxcar roofs one night, luring them to come away, they clamber on board.

He is Peter (Yashua Mack, a native of Antigua with a head of bouncy rasta dreads), who leads them to a mysterious volcanic island far out below the train trestle where he and his tribe of unsupervised children play all day long and never age.
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Having tinkered so shamelessly with the dans macabre between Captain Hook and Peter Pan for my own purposes in Alias Hook, I'm always fascinated to see what others bring to the story. And it strikes me that, in the end, the Zeitlins make the same mistake as plenty of other recent Peter Pan retellers — promoting this half-baked notion that Hook should just let go of his grumpy adult perceptions and embrace the unalloyed joy of spending the rest of eternity playing pirates with a gang of mangy boys.

Hey, wouldn't that be fun?

Here's what my James Hook has to say about that:

It is my fate to be trapped here forever in a nightmare of childish fancy with that infernal, eternal boy.