Neverwas is a muddled film that reduces the heartbreak of the disease of schizophrenia to a fanciful lark of literary imagination and children's fanciful dreams. Gabriel (Ian McKellan) is a hospitalized mental patient whose terrors of childhood abuse has driven him away from society and into the forest where he has constructed a kingdom of Neverwas. Zack (Aaron Eckhardt) is a psychiatrist who leaves an academic career to take a position in a small mental hospital where his celebrated writer/father Tom was committed and where he encounters Gabriel, who recognizes Zack as the child of the Neverwas myth. Haunted by the mythic story of Zack Small, the boy hero of his father's best seller children's book, also titled "Neverwas," Zack attempts to bring peace to the troubled minds of the mental patients and understand the clues which Gabriel delights in leaving for him. Attempting to piece together in a non-linear route of discovery, despite night terrors, and maniacal enchantment Zack's task is to outwit the system of stifling bureaucratic medicine, legal blockades, and commercial exploitation of Neverwas through Gabriel's clues.
If this begins to sound like a pitch for a feel-good, warm and fuzzy commercial spot it abounds in the film. With a superb cast of Jessica Lange as Zack's bruised alcoholic mother who can't forget her dead husband, Brittany Murphy as a reporter, Alan Cummings, and William Hurt as the hospital's administrator, Neverwas rambles toward a showdown in which Gabriel escapes to lead Zack on a merry chase back to the primeval landscape to revive his spirit of freedom from responsibility in a never ending playtime. While the premise of father-son reconciliation, redemption, forgiveness, and fulfillment weaves through the film, it is never achieved as the reality of the disease of schizophrenia can never be overlooked, and is anything but a playful romp in the forest green. The brilliant McKellen simply re-enacts his Gandalf personality with too much reliance on the seven dwarfs to come to the rescue. As the police surround the trash-heap towers Gabriel has erected on privately owned forest lands, the notion of squatters rights, eco-terrorism, and forest service clear cutting looms over the delusional situation that threaten to stop Gabriel's fantasy life.
Nevertheless, this is Hollywood which requires an upbeat ending. The improbability of salvation for the kingdom, the king, and the crown prince from the scourge of mental illness is forgotten and they all live happily ever after is the ultimate absurdity.
If this begins to sound like a pitch for a feel-good, warm and fuzzy commercial spot it abounds in the film. With a superb cast of Jessica Lange as Zack's bruised alcoholic mother who can't forget her dead husband, Brittany Murphy as a reporter, Alan Cummings, and William Hurt as the hospital's administrator, Neverwas rambles toward a showdown in which Gabriel escapes to lead Zack on a merry chase back to the primeval landscape to revive his spirit of freedom from responsibility in a never ending playtime. While the premise of father-son reconciliation, redemption, forgiveness, and fulfillment weaves through the film, it is never achieved as the reality of the disease of schizophrenia can never be overlooked, and is anything but a playful romp in the forest green. The brilliant McKellen simply re-enacts his Gandalf personality with too much reliance on the seven dwarfs to come to the rescue. As the police surround the trash-heap towers Gabriel has erected on privately owned forest lands, the notion of squatters rights, eco-terrorism, and forest service clear cutting looms over the delusional situation that threaten to stop Gabriel's fantasy life.
Nevertheless, this is Hollywood which requires an upbeat ending. The improbability of salvation for the kingdom, the king, and the crown prince from the scourge of mental illness is forgotten and they all live happily ever after is the ultimate absurdity.