Come Away: A grim, grownup fairy tale that mashes up Neverland and Wonderland, but falls short on magic
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
Awash in good intentions and weighed down by its grim premise, Come Away is a fantasy that fails to inspire, despite its star power (including David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie) and occasionally clever flourishes.
A mash-up “origin story” of both Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, the film by Brenda Chapman (Brave) seamlessly offers up a mixed-race cast of characters in this period tale set in the English countryside – chief among them, siblings Peter (Jordan A. Nash) and Alice (Keira Chansa), who, with their older brother David (Reece Yates) happily indulge their storybook fantasies about pirates and swordfights, before fate intervenes.
A traumatized Peter (Jordan A. Nash) meets the Lost Boys in Come Away.
Their parents, Rose and Jack (Jolie and Oyelowo) indulge the children’s play, to the consternation of Aunt Eleanor (Anna Chancellor), who has definite ideas, in particular of how a young lady like Alice should behave. She ascribes their rambunctiousness to their father’s lower class background (the closest the movie comes to a white character remarking on another’s race).
Jack and Peter are particularly close, bonding over the father’s hobby of making ships in a bottle (as the movie opens, they are working on a scale reproduction of Francis Drake’s ship Golden Hind, which circumnavigated the globe).
All such pleasure is temporary, however. An accident results in the loss of David, and the family is disrupted, with Rose falling prey to depression and narcotizing “medicine,” and Jack returning to the London underworld he’d given up for marriage (blink and you’ll miss the appearance here by Michael Caine).
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Like breadcrumbs leading us forward, totems of the familiar fairy tales pop up, including a tiny bell forged by a tinker (get it?) that is given to Alice by Rose, a bottle with a label that says, “Drink me,” a plush rabbit, a group of London urchins who pronounce themselves “Lost Boys,” and a long lost family member who inspires visions of Capt. Hook.
The whole thing is narrated by Alice as an adult (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), though the events of how Alice’s story and Peter’s connect across a generation are still murky by the end. In the meantime, a movie putatively about fantasy, wide-eyed imagination and joyful adventure falls prey to the prolonged tone of grief and tragedy that permeates Come Away.
Both Nash and Chansa are likable and precocious young actors, who hold their own with the adults. But I can’t see the movie appealing to children with its grownup tone, and the appeal to adults is hard to figure as well. The movie is so at odds with itself (the poster is a misleadingly Malificent-reminiscent shot of Jolie), you might think there were multiple writers, instead of one (Marissa Kate Goodhill).
The result is a beautifully-shot and well-acted, but storywise, it just doesn’t work.
Come Away. Directed by Brenda Chapman. Written by Marissa Kate Goodhill. Starring David Oyelowo, Angelina Jolie and Keira Chansa. The film is available for purchase on digital platforms on Friday, November 13.