Academic exercise, adapted from an unrenowned theater piece entitled The Man Who Was Peter Pan, that purports to show how the playwright J.M. Barrie sculpted the glazed statue of Peter Pan from the soft clay of his real-life relationship with a widow and her four boys. (Albeit a platonic relationship, both with the widow and -- titillating though it may be to believe otherwise -- with the boys: "There have also been questions of how you spend time with those boys, and why!") The usefulness of this exercise is rather diminished by the insistence, for Dramatic Purposes, that Barrie's stroke of inspiration was somehow a bolt from the blue: thus the concealment of the playwright's prior successes on the stage, the indifference to such outside literary influences as R.L. Stevenson (Treasure Island) and W.S. Gilbert (The Pirates of Penzance), the obliviousness to the prevailing child-worship afoot in England at the time, the denial of the pandering, undaring fashionability of the theme, and the preposterous pretense that it would constitute some sort of insight or revelation, as opposed to self-evident truism, that the play's subtitle, "The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up," applies equally to its author as to its hero. (In real life, what's more, the widow was not even a widow.) Johnny Depp summons up a decent Scottish accent to accompany an indecent smirk. And Kate Winslet is her usual tower of strength and intelligence in spite of a role so narrow in conception that she's not going to be allowed to cough unless she's going to die of it. With Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell, Dustin Hoffman; directed by Marc Forster. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd