Finding Neverland - 7

This film got me thinking about the idea of hope. That is that most movies are stories that direct the audience to hope for what the storyteller -author/director- hopes for. In the cheesiest form of this, most romantic stories set up the characters so that we know and hope that the only possible happy ending is the hooking up of the two main characters, all the other characters are not nice enough or worthy enough to deserve a happy ending. This film is in the same vein but on the other end of the spectrum. It shows the complexity of hope and its role in how we choose our actions in the present. There is the tension between belief, imagination, and reality. Hope is what holds these things together. The film does a good job of staying between being fun and being serious, while staying away from the trite answers to tough questions.