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.

Wendy, which Zeitlin co-wrote with his sister Eliza, isn’t a revolutionary feminist reading, then, but a superficial one. All that’s changed is that Wendy, too, now gets to run around and swing a sword at the pirates. And Barrie’s themes are at best merely reiterated and not expanded upon, dressed up in the director’s cinematic affection for all things ripped and rusted. Wendy and her twin brothers James (Gavin Naquin) and Douglas (Gage Naquin) escape from their mother’s home, a railside diner where the sallow-faced seek respite, and follow the mysterious Peter (Yashua Mack) to an island where children never have to grow old.

The director’s decision to shoot in Montserrat, home to an active volcano, lends his Neverland a harsh beauty, where wide, verdant beaches give way to a kind of ashy devastation. And, for much of Wendy’s runtime, the children – all charismatic, well-cast unknowns – are given free rein. They scamper through the foliage, burst through it, hurtle themselves off cliffs and into the ocean, as editor Affonso Goncalves adapts to their constant, kinetic energy.

Wendy (Devin France) follows the mysterious Peter (Yashua Mack) to an island where children never have to grow old (Elysian Film Group)

But as the youthful abandon subsides, as it must always do, a more threatening Neverland comes to the fore. “It turns out there are rules here,” Wendy tells us in one of the film’s many voiceovers. “Never slow down, never think twice.” A Lost Boy or Girl who allows in any of the weaknesses of adulthood – a pang of bitterness or cloud of regret – will find themselves ageing more quickly than those on the cursed beach of M Night Shyamalan’s Old. But, beyond a clever reinterpretation of Captain Hook (Kevin Pugh) as a figure of marauding adulthood, there’s little meat on that metaphor’s bone. The depiction of Peter, meanwhile, strays uneasily into the trope of the magical Black man – a whimsical naif that Wendy gets to instruct in the ways of the world. He’s just another afterthought in Zeitlin’s quest to reclaim the agency of a character who was never lacking it in the first place.