Finding Neverland (2004)

Intriguing (partial) biopic of the writer J.M. Barrie. 

Barrie is played unexpectedly well by Johnny Depp. Kate Winslet plays Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the widow he falls in love with and maintains a platonic relationship with, while becoming a sort of father to her children. In the meantime, he’s working on the Peter Pan play that will make his name, and which is inspired by the family he has become so attached to. 

It’s quite a touching story. “Neverland” works as a metaphor for make-believe/imagination and also for Heaven. There’s a strong performance by Julie Christie, as Sylvia’s strict and frosty mother. Dustin Hoffman is refreshingly unselfconscious as Charles Frohman, the play’s producer. 

It would be easy to criticise the film’s extremely sanitised portrayal of terminal disease, but it’s a story all about the imagination so it therefore seems to make sense that gritty realism is held at bay.

Heat and Dust (1983)

Strangely tepid Merchant Ivory adaptation of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel of 1975. 

In the 1980s, Anne (Julie Christie) travels from England to India to find out what happened to her great-aunt Olivia (Greta Scacchi) in the 1920s. The story splits so that we switch between both timelines. Olivia, we learn via extensive flashbacks, was married to a civil servant in the British Raj, Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), but caused scandal when she became involved with an Indian prince. 

The material is potentially interesting, but the treatment is leaden and stilted, despite the best efforts of Scacchi and Christie – who are the best thing about the film by some distance. The thread about civil unrest is not satisfactorily resolved. 

Slow and ponderous scenes lack vitality. Quite a few of them could have been trimmed or cut entirely. Ultimately, not a great deal happens and the drama that we do see is oddly underplayed. For example, we never get to find out how Douglas feels about his wife’s behaviour. In fact, we don't even learn how she feels about it herself. 

Maybe the novel is more exciting, but you’d never know it from sitting through these turgid 133 minutes.

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel is a lavish but disjointed epic that grinds on for 200 minutes. Omar Sharif stars as the doctor of the title, who falls in love with young Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). The film takes in World War I, the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War with a plot that’s too meandering to summarise neatly. Sometimes it races through events briskly, while at other times it appears to linger on scenes that don’t warrant being stretched out – a problem with pacing. 

On the plus side, the colours are rich and the all-star cast is uniformly excellent. It’s nice to see Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay back together again two years after Billy Liar, even if they don’t have much chemistry this time around. Omar Sharif is charismatic, with twinkling eyes and an undeniable presence, while Alec Guinness has a certain authority as the doctor’s brother. Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger and Ralph Richardson are all compelling, too.

On the down side, sometimes the narrative signposting is muddled. For example, when Lara cannot find her husband after the battle, we assume he’s dead but she neither mourns him nor asks about him. It’s simply not clear how she feels or how we’re meant to respond. I wondered if this was because the plot had to be condensed to work as a film, but if that’s the case maybe it could have added some simple explanatory sentences to bridge chunks of narrative that had to be cut. And if that is the reason, it’s ironic that they still ended up with such an incredibly long film (it takes up both sides of a DVD) that often feels slow and cumbersome.

Darling (1965)

Julie Christie stars as Diana Scott, a young model who doesn’t know what she wants from life. She leaves her husband to be with a literary interviewer (Dirk Bogarde), only to find herself soon becoming involved with an advertising executive (Laurence Harvey), who may be able to boost her career, and then with an Italian prince (José Luis de Villalonga), who will transform her into royalty. Each of these relationships fails her in some way, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about whether she is using these men or they are using her.

It’s visually striking and the music by John Danworth adds a further dimension. It’s unpredictable, too, rather than simply opting for cosy kitchen-sink Englishness – such as when a party in Paris proves to be a transgressive experience featuring unsettling identity games.

Julie Christie is excellent as the young dreamer who is deeply confused. The film is all the more effective and engaging as a character portrait because it doesn’t seek to moralise.

The Go-Between (1971)

Brilliantly evocative and resonant adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Dominic Guard is Leo, the 12-year-old spending the summer of 1990 with the Maudsley family in their large Norfolk country house. He finds himself becoming a go-between for Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), the local farmer she’s secretly having an affair with.

Like the book, it focuses on issues of social inequality. Marian’s affair transgresses class boundaries and is therefore taboo. It also probes into sexuality and how naive young Leo’s own consciousness of adult relationships is crippled by the way he is used to facilitate a union he cannot understand.

Julie Christie is excellent as the charming-but-manipulative Marian. Edward Fox is also strong as the posh-but-dull Hugh, unable to compete with the “savagery” of Ted.

The hot summer is expertly conveyed and you can feel the heat building to the inevitable storm that marks the climax. As child actors go, Guard is right up there (he was also in Picnic at Hanging Rock). The music, by Michel Legrand, is perfectly judged – sometimes lovely, often foreboding.

With the vivid way it’s shot and soundtracked, at times it has the feel of a horror film. But the horror turns out to be an emotional one. Rather than manifesting itself in sudden scares, it’s a terror that echoes down through the decades.

Billy Liar (1963)

The hilarious yet heartbreaking story of a young man who lives in his imagination to escape the pressures and tedium of his daily existence. Billy Fisher simply isn’t ready for the sensible, grown-up world that surrounds him. Caught up in a web of his own fabricated stories, he has promised to marry three different girls and has managed to “lose” the calendars he was meant to post out for his undertaker employer.

It’s an unbeatable character study and Tom Courtenay is spellbinding in the main role. Julie Christie is wonderful as Liz, the most free-spirited and modern of his three sweethearts. Leonard Rossiter and Rodney Bewes are excellent as his bods (Mr. Shadrack) and friend/colleague (Arthur Crabtree) respectively. I usually dislike fantasy scenes in films (they ruined 9 to 5, for example), but here they are integral and work especially well. Billy machine-gunning the people who enrage him is an extremely vivid depiction of his inner world. There’s so much humour and intelligence in the script (adapted by Keith Waterhouse from his own novel), and real poignancy builds as the single-day plot unravels. A masterpiece, pretty much. Watching this again after seeing Cemetery Junction, I realise just how much that film borrows from this one.

Don't Look Now (1973)

Based on the story by Daphne du Maurier, Nicolas Roeg’s psychological thriller verges on horror and is genuinely terrifying. 

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are in Venice, trying to come to terms with the death (by drowning) of their young daughter. But when they meet a woman who appears to have the gift of second sight, their lives are changed all over again. 

Roeg is brilliant at building tension. Visually, it’s striking too: recurring motifs come to carry great significance as the inevitability of the conclusion draws closer. 

Sutherland and Christie are all-too-believably “real” as the grieving parents. In some ways this is a film about bereavement and what it does to the mind and soul. 

The closing moments are unbearably tense and chilling, leaving you with an enduring feeling of being deeply unsettled and disturbed.