Article: Playing around with Peter Pan's ghost; Kate Winslet is beautiful, Johnny Depp believable. But the magic is missing from JM Barrie's life story WILL SELF ON FILM.

Byline: WILL SELF

FINDING

NEVERLAND **

Cert PG, 101 mins

THIS felt like a pretty sweet film while I was watching it, but over the course of the day it left me with a slightly saccharine aftertaste.

But, then, it is a quasi-biopic of JM Barrie and unlike many perfectly acute people I know, I have never really responded to his Peter Pan in any of its incarnations, whether theatrical, prose or film.

As an adult, I can appreciate that while ostensibly a piece of neutered whimsy, like the best children's productions of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, PP is positively rife with sex and death.

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