FINDING NEVERLAND is a beautifully sentimental movie about childhood and maintaining one's childlike sense of wonder at the world. Based on a biography of Peter Pan author JM Barrie (best actor nominee Johnny Depp), it tells the story of his friendship with the boy and family who inspired that tale. Barrie meets the "darling" Llewelyn Davies family in the park one day and quickly takes to the 4 fatherless boys and their charming, plucky mother (Kate Winslet). They've fallen on slightly hard times after the father's death, and Barrie kind of adopts them over the objections of Mrs Llewelyn Davies' socially connected mother (a still beautiful Julie Christie) and the concerns of Mr Barrie's wife. Barrie has come to a dead end in his writing career until inspired, and perhaps more importantly enthusiastically welcomed and loved, by the 4 little Llewelyn Davies and their mother. As it turns out, tragedy has not abandoned the Llewelyn Davies family, and this part of the story lends a melancholy to the film that will absolutely not leave a dry eye (literally, everyone in the theater was sniffling as the credits rolled). Not believing in "warts and all," director Marc Forster leaves out the inconvenient fact that Barrie and Llewelyn Davies met prior to the Mister's passing, but there's no disguising the genuine affection and connection that developed between the two. Still, it's a hopeful story about finding wonder and joy and love in unexpected places as long as one "just believes." Best picture? I don't see that, but the actors were all wonderful, and the little boy who plays Peter, with his funny ears and glasses, will steal your heart (he was nominated, but did not win, as best supporting actor by the Screen Actors Guild).
Ah, Ray Charles. The man made some beautiful music and was an interesting character. I mean, he was a groundbreaking musical genius, an adept businessman, an often-cruel ladies' man, a heroin addict, a guilty older brother, a father to 3 or 4 boys, a husband of many years, and all that while also being blind. Hard to believe, then, that RAY, the biopic about his life, is actually a kind of boring movie. It's problematic because the actors in RAY are all amazing, especially Jamie Foxx (nominated for Best Actor), who really seems to channel the persona of the man; Regina King as one of his more important lovers (they had a child); Kerry Washington, as his long-suffering wife with a deep understanding of her man's genius and demons; and all the guys in Ray's long-time posse. And yet the movie lost my interest long before its 153 minutes (yikes! 2+ hours) were up. Perhaps because its subject was so much larger than life, the movie feels like a series of vignettes that jump from character-making tidbit to musical scene to childhood flashback to revelation and back without much cohesion. I loved the look at Ray's start in the music business with Ahmet Ertegun and Atlantic Records; it was evocative of a time and place when music and society were evolving in tandem. I think the movie may have been better if it had focused on Charles' role in that evolution, or for that matter any other discrete part of his life. By trying to include most of his early adult life, the movie gave too little attention to any one formative moment and ended up with cheap psychological flashbacks to his mother and dirt-poor Georgia upbringing. Each ground-breaking moment, from incorporating Gospel rhythms, to his marriage and children, to his affairs, to his addiction, to his music breaking out into the "pop" world, is thrown at us in a scene that exists independent of what came before and seems to solve the "problem" at hand just like that. What the story of Ray Charles seems to highlight again is the fine line between genius and madness, between self-awareness and narcissism, between believing in your talent and believing the rules don't apply to you. It's got to be hard to tell that story without making the "hero" look like a creep some of the time, and director Taylor Hackford deserves credit for not editing out the dark side of Mr Charles. But by giving us brief glances into his subject's many facets rather than helping us to see the "something" that tied it all together, he ultimately leaves his subject shortchanged.
Why haven't I shared my thoughts about OCEANS 12 with you? Probably because I only had one, which was that the movie felt like a great, fun party that I got to drop in on for a couple hours. It had a plot that picks up a while after the end of Oceans 11, with Danny (George Clooney) out of jail, Tess (Julia Roberts) with child, and the gang spread hither and yon enjoying the spoils of their previous caper. Their idyllic postcrime lives are disrupted when Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) gets wind of their whereabouts and wants his money back, with interest. So Danny rounds up the gang plus one, another caper is planned and executed, a beautiful Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta-Jones) steals Rusty's (Brad Pitt) heart, and much fun is had by all. The upside: Italian scenery, some fabulous outfits on CZJ, a hundred minutes of mindless enjoyment, and Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon in suits. The downside: well, it doesn't make much sense, and Julia Roberts has looked better. Much, much better. There is some meta-plot with Julia's Tess pretending to be Julia, and an unnecessarily long visit from Bruce Willis, but overall, what the heck? With all the grim stories onscreen, this felt like a ray of silly sunshine.