Neverland and Back: ‘Hook’ (1991)

All little boys grow up, except one. Steven Spielberg’s Hook asks what would happen if the world’s most famous eternal child not only became a man, but a husband and father too. The answer is an intriguing, if not always satisfying foray into the Peter Pan mythos.

Peter Banning (Robin Williams) is a middle-aged, workaholic lawyer who has gradually let his career take precedence over his wife Moira (Caroline Goodall) and their two children, Jack (Charlie Korsmo) and Maggie (Amber Scott). Nothing is safe from the siren call of his business meetings: not Maggie’s school play and certainly not Jack’s Little League game. The family flies to London to spend Christmas with Wendy Darling (Maggie Smith), Moira’s grandmother and the woman who raised the orphaned Peter, until she arranged for an American couple to adopt him. Peter hasn’t visited in years; Wendy isn’t pleased with what she sees. When Jack explains what lurks behind his father’s euphemism “mergers and acquisitions”, Wendy is shocked. “Peter, you’ve become a pirate,” she says.

One night, Wendy and the Bannings return to find her home ransacked and the children missing, kidnapped by one Jas Hook. Peter calls in the police but Wendy knows better. Hook is Captain Hook and he has abducted Jack and Maggie to lure his nemesis back to Neverland. Because the stories J.M. Barrie wrote weren’t merely stories: Peter is really Peter Pan. 

Peter Pan has always been dear to Spielberg’s heart. His mother read the book to him as a bedtime story and he directed a production of the play at school when he was 11. He longed to make a Pan film and by the early 1980s, he finally had the clout to do it. Then fatherhood intervened. When Spielberg returned to the idea a few years later, it was with a screenplay by James V. Hart and Malia Scotch Marmo about the joys and terrors of being a father. Peter is an emotionally-absent parent missing out on Jack and Maggie’s childhoods—and completely oblivious to the splintering bond he has with his son. Troubled father-son relationships are a recurring theme in Spielberg’s films. (See E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun, Catch Me If You Can and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, among others.) In Hook, the living embodiment of childhood grows into the neglectful adult he used to despise, and doesn’t even notice the transformation. Spielberg deftly handles the gulf between Peter and his family, as well as his attempts to bridge it.

Which isn’t to say Hook is without flaws. The film nearly suffocates under a blanket of sentiment, so eager to impart life lessons that viewers witness the plot groaning, like the gears in Hook’s collection of battered clocks. Some aspects have aged appallingly. Barring a few exceptions, including the echidna-haired Rufio (a fine, spiky Dante Basco), the Lost Boys are an embarrassment; a cringeworthy display of what adults thought was hip. They skateboard, shoot hoops, spout self-conscious slang (“Pan the Man”) and live in a tree house assembled from the offcuts of Nickelodeon game shows. Neverland’s spell is also diminished by Julia Roberts, who plays Tinkerbell as an all-American sweetheart completely divorced from Barrie’s capricious sprite.

Thank goodness for what the film gets right. No one could have played Peter but Robin Williams. No one else had the charm, the dazzling playfulness, the complete lack of self-consciousness, the child-like glee. Williams takes Peter’s habit of standing with his arms akimbo, a hint of his inner Pan, and makes it seem natural every time. When Pan finally shines through, it’s a triumph for both Williams and Peter. Maggie Smith’s Wendy is the film’s backbone. When Wendy sees Peter again for the first time in a decade, Smith whispers just two words (“Hello, boy.”) and conveys a lifetime of love, loss, resignation and regret. Bob Hoskins is enormous fun as Smee, Hook’s lackey and sparring partner. And Dustin Hoffman enjoys every minute as the wily Captain Hook. Hook is the chief adult in a child’s world; this means he can be supremely childish, and Hoffman runs with it.

Hook had a lavish budget and most of the money is up on screen, in the elaborate sets—the Jolly Rodger looks particularly good—and the effects, which hold up well nearly 30 years later. John Williams’ soaring, magical score is one of his finest. Spielberg also squirreled several cameos away, including Glenn Close as a pirate. And listen closely for the pilot on the Bannings’ flight to London (on Pan Am, no less).

All children grow up. Hook, in its endearing, sometimes over-earnest way, suggests that’s something to be celebrated, not mourned. Peter’s mistake wasn’t growing older; it was forgetting that being an adult is just as much of an opportunity for joy as being a child. Life is change and living is an awfully big adventure.