A story about courage, wonder and never growing old.
2020-11-12
N/A
94 min
Before Alice went to Wonderland, and before Peter became Pan, they were brother and sister. When their eldest brother dies in a tragic accident, they each seek to save their parents from their downward spirals of despair until finally they are forced to choose between home and imagination, setting the stage for their iconic journeys into Wonderland and Neverland.
Come Away is a film about the power of imagination made by people who have none. This is not a script; it’s a mashup. Because it’s not enough to ruin one beloved children’s classic, this movie turns Alice and Peter Pan into biracial siblings whose parents are David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie.
The only way any of this would make any sense is if the entire story took place in either Neverland or Wonderland, which it most certainly doesn’t.
Movies like this always remind me of Fran Lebowitz explaining that art shouldn’t be a democracy but an intellectual aristocracy. Here we have an interracial marriage set in a time and place where such a union would have been all but impossible. Ignoring the struggle for equality does a disservice to those who fought and died for it.
The worst part is that the filmmakers lack the courage of their convictions, giving the dark-skinned Alice blonde highlights (which of course no one had in Victorian England). Do they actually think this is what happens when a blonde woman and a black man reproduce? Or are they afraid to make the character 'too black'?
All these distractions, however, do not change the fact that the plot is hopelessly pedestrian; say what you will of Hook, but at least it had joie de vivre. How bad do you have to suck to co-opt two iconic characters and still come out with less than the sum of the parts?
