Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: Wendy (2020) and the Art of Staying Young
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
By Trevor Ruth
It has been eight years since director Benh Zeitlin made his directorial debut with Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), an imaginative and, quite frankly, amazing example of what independent filmmaking can and should be. It took the aesthetic of the American South and exacerbated it to the height of a fantastic modern myth, ripe with emotion and ingenuity. The story of Hushpuppy and Wink in the experiential post-apocalyptic Bathtub community is something that can be felt on a personal level, and it is their relationship that keeps us invested in the strange, near surreal fantasy that shapes itself around Zeitlin’s bayou and its inhabitants. The film met incredible acclaim, racking up four Academy Award nominations and continuing to act as a modern classic for daring, genre-bending cinema, similar to Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013).
Zeitlin’s sophomore feature, Wendy (2020), could be met with the same level of admiration, however viewers will no doubt notice that something has certainly been lost in the presentation. Adapted from J. M. Barrie’s famous novel, Peter Pan (1904), Zeitlin’s film takes the whimsical and eccentric fairytale aspect of the original story and tosses it out the window for a much more adult view of mortality and imagination through the eyes of its titular character. To this end, Wendy is a rather intelligent coming-of-age tale that risks sacrificing its identity as an adaptation for a more personal study on what it means to grow older. Simultaneously, the film is also a bit distracted by its own grandeur, which is certainly earned, but not evenly distributed.
Wendy begins in the rustic South with our main character as a toddler, floating about the diner her mother works at passing out napkins to customers at the bar. She watches as a young boy communicates with a shrouded figure on a passing train outside. We’re never really told who this figure is; I assume that it’s Peter, though. We then cut to years later, where Wendy (Devin France) is a young girl who works the diner with her mother and goofs around with her brothers, Douglas and James, as they hunt for turtles in the river. One night they awaken to the sounds of a passing train and are called to ride along with the enigmatic Peter (Yashura Mack) to an island where time is disrupted due to the influence of a gigantic oceanic fish, simply named Mother. It is here where Wendy’s trust in Peter as a leader and as a friend are tested while she struggles with the realities of the real world and what it means to become an adult.
The moment the movie starts, we can already tell that it is a Zeitlin film: everything reeks of nostalgic wonder in its presentation and evokes something close to a fable; natural light allows the earthy colors of the real world to flourish without much to distract from the viewer in terms of exposure. Everything pops with life, even during night shots where the balance between the visible and invisible exists in a seemingly illustrated fashion with heavy contrasts of color. Meanwhile, the shaky, hand-held cinematography keeps the audience grounded. Shots where the camera is clearly fixed to the back of a train make us feel like we are holding tight to the rear, allowing the narrative to pull us in whatever the hell direction it wants to, while scenes of action are often blurry with movement, evoking a sense of realism.
This is not always the case, as there are some fantastic elements in the film that require a stationary shot for the viewer to really take in, including the island itself and the ingenuity of Mother’s design which shares the aquatic, scaly visage of the mermaids along with the glowing pollen substance that acts as the film’s version of pixie dust. These spores offer the children eternal youth provided they believe in her and steer clear of the negativity that the real world affords. When the film takes on a scenic flair, it does so well: the island offers grand visuals that recall the tribal nature of Lord of the Flies (1954) with a geography that exists of its own mythology. That said, they aren’t always phenomenal, as at times the film tends to linger on locations that are tropical, but still a bit too normal to be considered fantastic and—as such—the pacing suffers greatly.
There are places Peter forbids the children to enter, clearly marked by long stretches of dead, grey earth. Obviously, our main characters venture there, finding a community of adults who have lost the ability to imagine. Initially, they go here because Wendy’s brother, James, begins to lose himself to the nihilism of adulthood after an accident separates him from his twin. James’ hand begins to show signs of age and—treating the condition as a malady—he asks Peter to cut his hand off. After losing a great deal of blood, Wendy decides to consult the adult community as they are better qualified to deal with emergencies. Once in the adult community, James begins to assimilate, welcoming the tired negativity of adulthood and fashioning a hook for himself out of corroded metal before rallying the other adults into hunting Mother down, hoping to use her spores to make them young again. Interestingly enough, this proves that the island is able to accelerate growth as much as it is willing to deter growth.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
As you can guess, not much attention is spent on Peter in this version of the tale. This is to be expected; Zeitlin has a knack for using lesser-known talent and this film is no exception, though the younger child actors fair average in their performances outside of the Darling family. France does well as Wendy, narrating with a poetic flair and dropping idioms that feel like something out of a book: “When sad thoughts come to your mind, let them whiz out the other ear and be gone.” However, her flowery narration lacks a depth for the audience to latch onto and by the film’s end, we don’t really see much of what motivates her or what drives her character outside of her mother’s presence in her life.
Throughout the film, we get a sense that Wendy is afraid of growing old because it would mean that she would lose her mother. She constantly denies the fact that her mother will be gone some day, and even goes so far as to commune with a pile of refuse on the island, asking it to transfer a message to her mother. In the film’s climax, the characters all announce that they love their mothers in an attempt to raise Mother back to life after the adults hunt her down; a reversal of the I don’t believe in fairies concept. What we don’t necessarily see is what worries Wendy about growing older, outside of the fact that it would mean her mother would be gone. Scenes are shown of Wendy and her brothers hearing a bedtime story of how their mother sacrificed her personal dreams for her children’s; it is this single idea that triggers Wendy’s understanding of what it means to be a parent, of the cost that comes with adulthood.
As we grow older, our dreams and our fantasies become more distant and reality takes precedence. The adults of the island are stuck in their methodological ways, unable to remember what it means to play, to imagine. I especially love the parallels between the diner on the island with the diner in the real world, as they expose two very different views on community. In the beginning of the film we feel a sense of earnestness and companionship between Wendy and the customers; on the island, Wendy tries to help the adults grow in their creativity, but to very little effect. The adults desperately want to feel young again, but instead of believing in it for themselves, they depend on Mother’s spores. They, along with Peter and the lost boys, separate themselves from what fuels their nostalgia: the relationship that they had with their parents. It’s at this point that they call out to their mothers and they learn that love—specifically, maternal love—is what connects us to our pasts and invites us to feel the childlike wonder that we once had.
There’s something beautiful about the fact that James grins at being named Captain Hook, and there’s something even more beautiful about the shot that follows where he and Peter battle on a rock formation with the rest of the adults and children shouting in the foreground after Peter yells enthusiastically, “My archenemy!” It recalls the initial origins of Barrie’s story as a stage production: the characters are merely actors taking on a role, which they are called upon. It’s a play in every sense of the word, they are acting out their roles but they are having fun doing it as well. They are committing themselves to a singular purpose, but through their imagination and their nostalgia, they are able to reconnect with the child inside all of them. Once Wendy gets back to the real world, we get to watch her grow into an adult and eventually have a daughter of her own before they are whisked off in the middle of the night by Peter on the train. Wendy tries to keep up, but is told that she is too old to reach them and instead, cries and waves at them knowing that eventually, her daughter will return, presumably wiser than before.
Perhaps Zeitlin’s film might appear too absurdist for a modern audience. It certainly seems a lot dirtier and rougher than what we are used to seeing, but this is what gives Wendy its sense of intrinsic charm. We are no doubt desensitized by the Walt Disney Animated version from 1953 and later incarnations, such as Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991) and Joe Wright’s Pan (2015), that view Barrie’s story as a whimsical bedtime narrative. However, a story’s magic comes in many different forms. For Zeitlin, the magic of Peter Pan is a product of the relationships that we hold onto as we lose our sense of adolescence and we abandon the days where we might go outside and get lost in the dirt patches on the other side of town, or raise hell amongst the tracks where trains are the most threatening creatures on the planet. As children, everything we do feels like an adventure. Wendy is the kind of film that reminds us that we don’t have to abandon that feeling as we grow older, we simply have to remember what it was like to be a kid and that way, we can suddenly take part in the magic all over again.
Trevor Ruth is a writer from Livermore, California, whose work has previously appeared in Occam’s Razor, The Southampton Review, and other literary journals. He writes fiction and poetry that utilizes slipstream to subvert genre ideals, as well as critical essays on film and art. Find more of his work on Instagram @crimsoncomet3.