Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin returns with an overlong and sometimes excruciating update of the Pan story
Wendy, a spin on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan myth, takes all the chaos, noise and lack-of-focus of director Benh Zeitlin’s earlier picture Beasts of the Southern Wild and amplifies it. The 2012 surprise hit, which went from Sundance discovery to four Academy Award nominations, got a tremendous amount of mileage from its peculiarity of place and heartfelt father-daughter relationship. That’s very much missing here. What we’re left with is something like Spike Jonze’s 2009 adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are without the adorable creatures. Wendy is undoubtedly self-assured and in-your-face, and the gorgeous location photography certainly has an impact. But it’s wrecked by chapters so lengthy they become simply excruciating.
We begin with a tense scene in a greasy spoon diner loaded with crusty characters inches from a train yard hauling freight. After a child totters off and disappears, we cut years later to three pre-adolescent siblings (friends of the missing kid), children of the restaurant’s hardworking but loving single mom owner. From the window of her bedroom, Wendy (Devin French) spies a kid on the roof of a passing train and takes a leap of faith. Her twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin) follow. In time (and via many methods of transport) they arrive in a mystical land where unaccompanied minors are free to stomp around, yell and never grow up.