Director: Joshua Michael Stern
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Alan Cumming, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte
No wonder that first-time writer-director Joshua Michael Stern comes about as someone in a perpetual state of daydreaming involving vague and clear images of applauding festival crowds, golden statuettes and humbly elegant acceptance speeches. Anyone whose first script is embraced by a cast including Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte and Alan Cumming would. And these actors don’t even play the lead roles. Stern’s sense of self-importance, underscored by the fact that these names are billed below the film’s title, indicates that he was oblivious to the fact that his story was in effect contrived, cliched and awkwardly sentimental. His story is named Neverwas and many viewers would wish it never were indeed, a pun to which, no doubt, many critics will resort.
Neverwas was a famed Peter Pan-meets-Harry Potter children’s book, written by the depressive author T L Pierson (Nick Nolte) who eventually committed suicide. The event turned his wife Katherine (Jessica Lange) into an eternally grieving alcoholic and scarred his son Zach for life. Years later the grown up Zach (Aaron Eckhart), now a psychiatrist, decides to leave his academic career at Cornell behind and take up in the mental institution where it turns out his father had spent quite some time battling his demons, a fact that Zach fails to mention to his supervisor Dr Reed (William Hurt).
Zach is tired of hearing of the life-changing effect Neverwas has had on countless children and feigns zero interest in his father’s persona while in fact being obsessed by it.
He furtively visits the clinic’s archives, looking for clues about his old man’s torture of mind. Things are not helped when he meets the graduate student Maggie (Brittany Murphy), a girl he knew when they were kids, who has been in love her whole life with both Neverwas and Zach himself. Meanwhile, a bearded old patient at the clinic named Gabriel (Ian McKellen) acts as if he actually lives in Neverwas’ fantasy world.
The story is not without interest, but the maddening arbitrary shifting between fantastical tones and TV-drama sentimentality make following it a rather unrewarding experience. Matters are not helped by the dialogue, which ranges from soap-opera cliches to implausible stage-play elaborate phrasing, which leaves the talented cast at a loss: the romance between Zach and Maggie comes about as awkwardly contrived, the requisite complications even more so; Jessica Lange conjures a sad caricature of a character, while Nolte and Cumming riff on themes they have explored before, and better.
Ian McKellen gives the one truly notable performance worth taking home; his vigorous yet sad lunatic seems to exist independently from the film; it is as if Gandalf has wandered into our world and his majesty is rendered pathetic by the petty practicality of the surroundings. McKellen appears able to find greatness at the most awkward of places, and his presence in the confusing climax is a telling counterpoint to the outlandish and embarrassing speech Eckhart gives while defending Neverwas from, well, the evil sheriff’s office.
