Pan

Released:  October 9^th, 2015

Rated:  PG

Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Levi Miller, Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried

Directed by:  Joe Wright

Written by:  Jason Fuchs

Personal Bias Alert:  likes Joe Wright, not a big Peter Pan lover

5.7 of 10

            It’s been a mere 113 years since J. M. Barrie introduced the world to Peter Pan.  In that short amount of time, the impish boy has become ingrained in Western culture, carving out a place next to centuries-old fairy tales in the pantheon of childhood standards.  Today, the character is considered a personal favorite by many, a wondrous ode to childhoods we can never get back.  This love sets the bar high for any new version of the story, and anyone brave enough to meddle with the formula must either turn in a masterpiece or contend with the remonstrations of its ardent fans.

            Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Jason Fuchs are two souls brave enough to invent an origin story for Peter (Levi Miller), Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) that shakes up their usual relationships.  Unfortunately, their gamble didn’t pay off well enough to be embraced by the masses, and the immediate backlash has made the off-kilter but enjoyable film out to be one of the biggest flops of 2015.  Hopefully its reputation softens over time, both because there’s a lot to appreciate here and because we should never discourage anyone from being bold enough to reinvent instead of just retelling the classics.

            Wright, who has made his fair share of good and bad movies, always turns in marvelous-looking films, and if for nothing else, this is why you should see Pan in theaters.  Few people pull back the camera quite like him, capturing big, meticulously staged sequences that are apt to take your breath away.  Shot for shot, few other filmmakers give us as consistently glorious visuals as he does, and the magical world of fairies and flying ships featured in Pan proves to be a ripe playground for his sweeping style.

            Wright is also well known for his scores, and while Pan features an appropriately swashbuckling one, it’s unlikely that anyone will walk out of the theaters remembering it.  Any commentary on the music in this film is sure to highlight the odd use of contemporary songs, most notably the jaw-droppingly weird sequence where we are introduced to Hugh Jackman’s Blackbeard by having thousands of men singing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.  Why?  This is never explained, although there is another similar scene a few minutes later.  Both take place early on in the film when everything that happens is so broad and utterly strange that none of it makes much sense.  These are some gratingly disjointed scenes, and if the rest of the film had continued to be that weirdly incongruous, we would be having an entirely different discussion.

            But eventually we are introduced to Tiger Lily, and the film is given a goal to steadily work towards.  The overt oddities subside, and we are left with a jaunty kids movie that has a delightful amount of weirdness.  The cast, who was previously hamstrung by Wright’s decision to go big and broad, settle into some actual relationships, and a calming force tamps the whole thing into submission.  Rooney Mara, inadvertently, I believe, is that force, as she was likely told to go big like everyone else but just didn’t have it in her.  She’s not a great physical actress, and while everyone else is prancing about, she walks through the film with the same shuffling gate as her version of Lisbeth Salander.  This isn’t to say that she doesn’t make her part work; if anything, Mara makes Tiger Lily into the most well-defined character in the whole shebang.   She just also brings the energy level down to a more palatable level.

            With such slapdash success, it’s wrong to label Pan as an outright failure.  It may not reach the heights that previous iterations of Peter’s story did, but there’s some wondrous moments to be found if you give it a chance.

Other Notes:

Ø  Some of the CGI here is atrocious, but I saw the same sort of doughy people in the opening of Avengers:  Age of Ultron.

Ø  I wasn’t as annoyed with Garrett Hedlund’s toothy performance as I thought I would be.

Ø  Maybe I’m just a sucker for Joe Wright’s style?