52 Films by Women Vol 5. 46. COME AWAY (Director: Brenda Chapman)
In Come Away , writer Marissa Kate Goodhill and director Brenda Chapman take the combined plots of James Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and turn them into a hybrid cross between Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist . It isn’t, as they say, pretty. Set at an unspecified time, either Victorian or Edwardian era England, it showers the narrative with motifs from Barrie’s and Carroll’s fiction without any of the charm. The idea might have worked if each iconic character had suddenly entered the other’s enchanted world (Peter in Wonderland, Alice in Neverland) and the two worlds were under threat owing to the displacement of the young protagonists but that is not the film that Goodhill and Chapman have made. This is a film in which an entire family, the Littletons, embraces fantasy to a lesser or greater degree. Mama Rose (Angelina Jolie) makes hats so her children can dress up. Papa Jack (David Oyelowo) builds model repl...