Grade: A-

Verdict: Wonderful — and Johnny Depp just may find himself with an Oscar.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

As anyone who's ever seen "Peter Pan" knows, finding Neverland is easy: second star to the right and straight on till morning.

However, as Marc Forster's transcendent movie "Finding Neverland" shows us, for author James M. Barrie, finding the place where dreams are born and time is never planned wasn't so simple.

Forster's film is a semi-fictionalized version of how the famed Scottish author -- beautifully played with a pitch-perfect Edinburgh burr by Johnny Depp -- came to create his timeless tale of Lost Boys and ticking crocs and dying fairies who could be revived if only you believed and clapped your hands as hard as you could.

When we first meet Barrie in turn-of-the-century London, his life is in disarray. His newest play, "Little Mary," has just flopped, and his marriage isn't doing much better.

His beautiful wife (Radha Mitchell) is an ambitious, society-conscious woman who feels shut out of her dreamy husband's creative life. In a lovely moment that seems straight out of last year's "Big Fish," the two retire to separate bedrooms. When she opens her door, we see normal furniture; when he opens his, we see a sun-dappled meadow.

Barrie goes to the park every day, a writing pad in one hand and in the other a fishing pole with which he plays a peculiar game of catch with his bearish Newfoundland. On one such golden afternoon, he encounters a young widow, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet, in full English rose mode), and her four sons. He befriends the family, as both a companion to her and a surrogate father of sorts to the boys. They, in turn, provide him with someone he can play cowboys and Indians with, as well as the inspiration for his masterwork.

However, things are never that simple. Sylvia's formidable mother (Julie Christie, beautiful even as a dragon lady) is furious that Barrie's constant presence is keeping possible suitors away from her daughter. More problematic are the scandalous whispers Barrie's good friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, that Arthur Conan Doyle) shares with him. A grown man spending so much time with underage boys seems, well, unseemly at best. Barrie finds the notion outrageous.

Forster's previous picture "Monster's Ball," which brought Halle Berry her Oscar, dealt in oversize emotions — great anger or great passion or great fear. "Finding Neverland" is, by comparison, a whisper of a film — delicate and restrained, tender and whimsical, streaked with humor but headed toward a heartwrenching, get-out-your-handkerchiefs ending. The most noise in the movie is made by the playwright's loyal but exasperated producer (Dustin Hoffman, nailing a sharp cameo). Told that Barrie wants to set aside 25 seats on opening night for the children from a nearby orphanage, the producer — already nervous about putting on a play that opens with a man in a dog suit turning down a bed — sighs, "Right. Now my nightmare is complete."

As it happens, Barrie's instincts are dead on. The privileged audience of judges, politicians and bejeweled society matrons doesn't initially know what to make of "Peter Pan." But then, in one of the most enchanting and spine-tingling scenes of the year, it slowly responds to the children's delighted giggles. Somehow, something of these adults' long-buried child-selves rises to the surface, and the play is a tremendous success.

Depp's wondrous performance is very likely to earn him another Oscar nomination. His Barrie is the sort of man-child who connects with children directly and without condescension. Their world of pirates and flying and mermaids is real to him, much more than his wife's world of opening-night parties and dinners with the right people.

After the curtain comes down on "Peter Pan's" spectacular first performance, a number of adults in the audience gather around Peter (Freddie Highmore), Mrs. Davies' third son — and the one to whom Barrie feels closest because the child's grief over his father's death has made him grow up too fast while, conversely, the writer has prolonged growing up as long as possible. Told by his admirers he must be Peter Pan, the boy solemnly points at Barrie and says, "No. He is." (Highmore may also find himself in Oscar contention; he gives the most nuanced and convincing child performance since Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense.")

"Finding Neverland" frees Barrie's masterpiece from contemporary associations with psychological complexes or a celebrity's scandal-tainted ranch, returning it to the realm of wonder, innocence and imagination. The film reminds us not only of the many uses of enchantment, but of the exhilarating magic of the words, "Let's pretend."