Neverwas
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Bill Bellamy, Michael MoriartyDirector: Joshua Michael Stern
Studio: Miramax
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Running Time: 108 minutes
DVD Release: July 3rd 2007
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DVD Review
A stellar cast buoys Neverwas, a 2005 feature written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern. And what a lineup it is. Aaron Eckhart stars as Zach, a psychiatrist who abandons his cushy gig at Cornell in order to work at a funky, underfunded New England institution run by Dr. Peter Reed (an underused William Hurt), where his own father (Nick Nolte, seen in various flashbacks), who wrote the wildly popular children's book named in the title but was also a manic depressive, was briefly ensconced before killing himself, leaving his young son burdened with the grim memory of finding the body. Ian McKellen is Gabriel, a patient at the nuthouse in question who knows a good deal more about Zach's dad than Zach does; Jessica Lange is his boozy, annoying mother; Brittany Murphy is his love interest; and other patients include Michael Moriarty, The Departed's Vera Farmiga, and Bill Bellamy. Their respective agents must have had a field day determining the billing order, but Neverwas, which bears a passing resemblance to Finding Neverland and The Fisher King, doesn't seem to know what kind of picture it wants to be. It's not family fare, as themes like suicide and mental illness are too dark and complex for kids. It's not a romance, nor is it a fantasy, a father-son drama, or an adventure. Not that it doesn't have its strong points: McKellen lights up the screen every time he appears on it, the cinematography is often quite lovely, and the overall notion of life and art as a circular form, as in Zach's having to figure out how he fit into both his dad's book (the hero is a boy named Zachary) and his real life, is intriguing. On balance, however, Neverwas is a whole that is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts. --Sam Graham
User Reviews
A True Life "Tolkien" Tale.......... - Rating: 5/5
An all-stare cast, and dispite what others have said an ingenious and delightful true life like tale...........
Whole V Parts - Rating: 3/5
I thought that on the whole it was a good movie, worth watching, unless you want torrid love scenes and people droping dead ever five minutes.
It's a good Winter movie.
There are reasons why "Neverwas" went directed to DVD despite a stellar cast - Rating: 3/5
"Neverwas" has one of the most impressive casts I have ever seen for a film that I never ever heard of before it came out on DVD. This is a movie that takes Michael Moriarty and uses him as background. There must be an interesting story about how writer and first-time director Joshua Michael Stern got such a strong cast for his film. I assume that he got one big name, such as Ian McKellan, to sign and that is how Oscar winners like William Hurt and Jessica Lange signed out for small roles. Perhaps they and Nick Nolte, Alan Cummings, and Cynthia Stevenson all came in and worked for a day or two on this film. Now, I can describe what happens in "Neverwas" in a couple of sentences and if you were an actor you would probably want to be in the movie and it would sound like a film worth seeing, but that would give away what happens and I do not want to do that. However, I can tell you that what might have looked good on paper does not translate to the screen, which would explain why "Neverwas" never went into commercial release.
There have been films about kids who were the lead characters in successful children's books, both fictional as in "Butterflies Are Free" and factual as in "Dreamchild." Both of those movies serve as reference points for "Neverwas." The former was about a young blind man whose mother wrote a book for him about the adventures of "Donnie Dark" when he was a kid, and now he has to live that done. The latter is about Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the little girl who inspired the Reverend Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) to write "Alice in Wonderland," who comes to the United States as an elderly woman to receive a honorary degree from Columbia and be celebrated as the model for what Mark Twain called "the immortal Alice." In this film Zach Riley (Aaron Eckhart) has taken his mother's maiden name as his last name because if he goes around as Zachary Pierson people would know that he is the son of T.L. Pierson (Nick Nolte), the author of "Neverwas," and that he was the model for Zachary Small, the young hero of the story. His father suffered from schizophrenia, depression, and substance abuse, and it was young Zach who found his father's corpse.
Consequently, Zach clearly has good reason to run away from his past, but he has a strange way of doing it. At the start of this movie Zach, who is a psychiatrist, leaves Cornell to talk his way with Dr. Peter Reed (Hurt) into taking a position at the Millwood Clinic, a residential facility back where he grew up. In fact, his father had been a patient at Millwood (not that anybody knows that since Zach has changed his name), so Zach has some idea of helping those at the same place where his father was clearly not helped that much. Zach meets Maggie Blake (Brittany Murphy), who loves his father's book and has a "Neverwas" lunch box, but then he also meets Gabriel Finch (McKellan), a patient at Millwood who has not spoken for years. Finch looks at Zach and speaks to him and we quickly learn that the old man thinks that Zach the psychiatrist is a grown up version of Zachary Small, who has promised to come and rescue him because Gabriel is the King of Neverwas.
At this point the movie presents the irony of Zach treating a patient who's delusion is that he is from the world of his father's book. However, Stern has several twists as this story plays out, and while I would be loathe to say which particular twist this story would be better without I can say that the cumulative effect might be one of the reasons why this film does not work, but it does not. This is a stellar cast, but maybe the film is miscast in the key roles, because McKellan is channeling a bit too much Gandalf in the role and the smile Ekhart plasters on his face when he does sessions with the patients seems like a pale imitation of the one that works so well in "Thank You for Smoking." If those two roles do not work, then the film is on the wrong track. The sense of mystification continues when you look at who is on the other side of the camera because Philip Glass composed the score and the production design is fairly impressive (I especially like the notebooks and other elements of "Neverwas"), but the sum is considerably less than the equal value of the parts.
Stellar cast can't enliven this dull film - Rating: 2/5
It is amazing that a first-rate cast (Aaron Eckhart, Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Britney Murphy, Alan Cumming, and an interesting premise on paper can turn out to be such a sleep-inducing film, but "Neverwas" is just that. The film was made in 2005 and never got a commercial release and was eventually shown on a cable network. Eckhart plays a psychiatrist who accepts a position at a mental institution where his father committed suicide. There, he reconnects with friends from his childhood as well as a patient (McKellen) who knew his father well and helps Eckhart undercover buried secrets, among them the secret fantasy world that his father created in a popular book. The film has a colorful visual style but it is not enough to bring any interest to this terribly boring film. Eckhart and McKellen are fine in their roles but actors like Jessica Lange, William Hurt and Alan Cumming are wasted.
