Wendy, review: a superficial rather than revolutionary feminist reading of JM Barrie’s character

It’s an odd conceit in itself, considering that Wendy has always been the protagonist of Barrie’s story

Devin France plays the young Wendy (Elysian Film Group)

Dir: Benh Zeitlin. Starring: Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin, Ahmad Cage, Krzysztof Meyn, Romyri Ross. 12A, 112 mins

Benh Zeitlin’s directorial debut, 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, was an unfettered success – if you look at it purely in conventional terms. Grossing over $23m at the box office, on a $1.8m budget, it went on to earn four Oscar nominations. Its breakout star, then nine-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis, remains the youngest Best Actress nominee in history. But that pristine image hides a thornier, more complex conversation that’s bubbled up behind the scenes – one that’s both questioned and defended a white director’s authority to excavate his own mythology out of Black southern culture, turning the Louisiana bayou into a place of naive magic and whimsy.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was, at least, propelled by a fierce, political drive, focused on a community threatened by hurricanes and rising sea levels. But Zeitlin’s follow-up, Wendy, released nine years later, sees the director double down on his style while finding little reason to justify it. It’s a film so feathery thin in its viewpoint that it retroactively strengthens the criticisms levelled against his first feature. Here, the American south becomes a vessel for Zeitlin’s reimagined take on JM Barrie’s oft-adapted Peter Pan, supposedly told from the perspective of Wendy Darling (Devin France). It’s an odd conceit in itself, considering that Wendy has always been the protagonist of Barrie’s story. She may have found herself confined by contemporary gender roles, treated as a de facto mother by the Lost Boys of Neverland, but no other character better embodied the hard act of treasuring childhood while learning to let it go.