Mark Reviews Movies: COME AWAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 12, 2020

Appropriately opening with a stanza from a poem by William Butler Yeats, Come Away offers the promise of fantasy and a reminder that "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." Screenwriter Marissa Kate Goodhill and director Brenda Chapman are mostly concerned with the weeping.

This is a pretty dark and mostly depressing tale, in which two children, modeled after two famous characters of literary fantasy, discover misery after misery and hardship after hardship. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Children's stories have long dealt with difficult matters of life and death, as a way for kids to comprehend and cope with the struggles, pain, and uncertainty that comes with, well, life and death.

Something, though, feels decidedly off about this particular tale. There's a lot of struggle, pain, and uncertainty, revolving around death and gambling debts and depression and matters of class and family divisions finally coming to antagonistic—and even violent—ends. From the movie's embrace of some fantastical elements and its ultimately uplifting tone, we really start to wonder if the filmmakers realize what a despondent story they've spun.

The central gimmick involves a mish-mash of J.M. Barrie's famously and forever young character of Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll's curious adventurer Alice, with her travels to Wonderland. It's presented as a sort of origin story for both characters, who live ordinary lives until an assortment of tragedies force them to decide how invested each will become in the fantasy realms they've imagined.

This idea is curious—as in kind of intriguing, despite how random the generation of the concept seems to be—and more curious still, because of how messy the execution of it actually becomes. We witness some recognizable motifs and a few memorable characters from both Barrie and Carroll's stories, as young Peter (Jordan A. Nash) and Alice (Keira Chansa) try to fix the problems of life and escape into their respective fantasy worlds, but the focus here really is on just how miserable things are and can become.

Peter and Alice live with their older brother David (Reece Yates) and the children's parents, Rose (Angelina Jolie) and Jack Littleton (David Oyelowo), in a cramped cottage in the woods, some miles from London. The three play at imaginative games, involving battles and swashbuckling (pirates, of course, as well as the influence of Barrie's fictional Native American tribe, with Alice having the nickname "Tiger Lily"). The central debate among the siblings is whether or not they want to grow up. The younger kids are happy as they are, but David has been accepted at a notable boarding school.

Then, while playing pirates with Peter, David dies after falling into a river, which is struck by lightning. Rose falls into a deep depression, obsessively making a hat for her dead son (The story ultimately has two "mad" hatters) and drinking a "potion" that dulls her emotions. Jack, who escaped a gambling debt from a local crime boss, goes back to his betting ways and suddenly finds himself facing the debt coming due.

As for the kids, Peter feels the pressure of replacing his older brother, and Alice also decides it's time to grow up, attaching herself to her maternal aunt Eleanor (Anna Chancellor), a judgmental upper-class type, to learn how to be a proper lady. While Peter imagines a gang of Lost Boys (or "Lawst Bois," as they spell it) in the forest, Alice believes a bell gifted by a tinker is really a fairy (a tinker's bell or "Tinkerbell") and is tempted to enter a new world by way of her mother's "potion."

That's a lot of pain and despair, and we haven't even discussed the owner of a London pawn shop, the real "mad" Hatter (Clarke Peters) of the story, and his intimidating son (played by David Gyasi), as well as their relationship to this family, or how Jack finally pays off his gambling debt. The complications never cease, increasing in anguish and threat to such a degree that there seems to be no hope for anyone involved.

That, more than anything else, becomes the main focus here. Goodhill's mixture of two fantasy characters and worlds is convincing at times (The need and inclination for both kids to escape all of this worldly torment are palpable, because the alternative just continues to become more dreadful) but too often just feels like a random assemblage of familiar ideas, places, and characters. For a while, Chapman convinces us of the grief and its consequences for all of these characters, but the screenplay, which continuously piles on more obstacles and conflict, gets in the way of making that emotional core credible.

It especially gets in the way of uncovering hope or solace in the movie's turns toward the imagination. That turn arrives so late in Come Away that no amount of fairies, vest-wearing rabbits, immortally young children, or sword fights with a hook-handed pirate can overcome the weeping.

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