'NEVERLAND' LOW ON MAGIC, BUT IT MAY HOOK YOU.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THAT OLD impossible-to-film subject, a writer writing, gets a lot of help in ``Finding Neverland.''

James M. Barrie's inspirations for his play ``Peter Pan'' were pretty concrete and certainly lent themselves to drama. Add that to the playwright's own quirky personality, and you can't help but come up with a film rich in winsome enchantment and tear-duct-draining pathos.

It also doesn't hurt to toss in man-boy extraordinaire Johnny Depp as Barrie and top-notch actress Kate Winslet as the mother of the brood whom he reimagined into the Lost Boys. But the casting doesn't help as much as you'd expect.

For all that's right in ``Neverland,'' one crucial element remains elusive - the same one you don't usually find in author biopics - that sense of magic being worked. Despite director Marc Forster's (``Monster's Ball'') deft intercutting between real-life and fantasy settings, the portrayal of the boys' imaginations cross-pollinating with Barrie's comes off uninspired. The great creative mystery is neither illuminated nor rendered mysterious enough.

But there is more on the movie's agenda, and most of it is to the good. David Magee's script, which was adapted from Allan Knee's play ``The Man Who Was Peter Pan,'' offers up an interesting look at Edwardian London literary society and two very unusual families. The wealthy Barrie is in a loveless marriage with the socially aspiring Mary (Radha Mitchell). Pains are taken to indicate that the couple's troubles might rest as much in the Scottish playwright's yet-to-be-clinically-identified Peter Pan tendencies as in the missus' status concerns.

Certain lifelines in the Llewelyn Davies clan have been altered for the fiction. When Barrie meets the brothers who will become his playmates in Kensington Gardens, there are only four (there was actually an infant fifth) and their mother Sylvia has already been widowed (when actually her husband was still around). The latter tweak gives 1904 society something to talk about - the married Mr. Barrie spending too much time with Mrs. Llewelyn Davies - while deflecting attention from something that could upset 2004 society - Mr. Barrie spending too much time playing with young boys.

Dustin Hoffman is especially droll as Barrie's American producer. Freddie Highmore is particularly solid as 10-year-old Peter Llewelyn Davies. Depp doesn't exactly give a great performance, but it is an accomplished one that keeps whimsy in balance with dark fears of failure and loss and, yes, having to grow up. And once Sylvia starts heading down the consumptive path that will leave her boys orphaned, sudsy sorrow and exhortations to BELIEVE (in what, particularly, I didn't get) crush one's emotional responses into fairy dust.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

FINDING NEVERLAND - Three stars

(PG: children in jeopardy, mild violence)

Starring: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Freddie Highmore, Radha Mitchell, Julie Christie, Dustin Hoffman.

Director: Marc Forster.

Running time: 1 hr. 41 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; AMC Century 14, Century City; The Grove, Farmers Market; AMC 7, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: Fanciful account of how J.M. Barrie came to write his classic ``Peter Pan'' moves and charms, but it never really flies as a work of imagination in its own right.

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Kate Winslet plays Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the mother of the children who inspire ``Peter Pan'' author J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp), in ``Finding Neverland.''