*** (out of ****)
Starring Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, James Fox, Missi Pyle, Deep Roy, Helena Bonham Carter, Noah Taylor
Directed by Tim Burton & written by John August, from the novel by Roald Dahl
2004
115 min PG
The appeal of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is simple: a comically unbalanced and reclusive weirdo takes us (and five children) on a tour of his bizarre, illogical, and utterly impractical candy factory. The joke is that everything he thinks will impress the children only confuses or even frightens them. Because the weirdo is played by Johnny Depp—who specializes in weirdoes in movies like “Ed Wood,” “Edward Scissorhands,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”—we know he’ll make us laugh whenever he doesn’t make us squirm. And because the director is Tim Burton—who specializes in bizarre landscapes that seem to spring directly from the psyches of his unbalanced protagonists, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Batman,” and “Big Fish”—we know that the factory will be a mind-boggling array of candy-colored special effects and production design, that makes us go “ooh!” and “ahh!” whenever we’re not saying “we’ll that’s just plain freaky and unnerving!”
Oh, look at all the remakes. In the “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” from the 1970s, billionaire candy maker Willy Wonka is portrayed by Gene Wilder as a liar, a misanthrope, and a mad recluse who, deep down, despises children. In this new “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which keeps the novel’s original title, Johnny Depp is also a liar, a misanthrope, and a mad recluse who hates children. The difference is that the earlier film didn’t seem to realize how creepy Willy is, and tries to cram him into the cuddly confines of a kiddie movie. I think this is what Pauline Kael means when she complains that it “never finds an appropriate style.”
Wilder’s Wonka is also a smug, occasionally grating know-it-all, and a static figure who remains the same from the beginning of the movie to the end. Depp, director Tim Burton, and screenwriter John August have changed that as well: instead, he is the most dynamic character of their movie. He is vulnerable, fragile, and intensely uncomfortable around children, to the point of being allergic to them. And they also recognize that, yes, he is a freak, many of the things he says are just plain weird, and that to cast him in the beaming, soft light of a children’s movie is to, in a way, mislead the audience. I like this new approach to Wonka better.
And what a fun, crazy, totally unhealthy Wonka is set out for us by Johnny Depp! Grinning uncomfortably, speaking with Walken-esque pauses, dressed in a top hat and leather gloves, like an overpaid carny on cocaine, not quite understanding his own cue cards, his maniacal eyes wide as children tumble to their doom. He has been hiding inside his candy factory for 20 years, unseen by human eyes. Then one day he announces a worldwide competition to allow five children (and one parent apiece) to be taken on a tour of his factory. His introduction to the children who have won the fabled Golden Tickets explains everything: a “Small World After All”-style animatronic puppet show is put out for the kids’ amusement, playing that infectiously annoying ditty from the movie’s trailer, only to have the mechanism catch on fire while the puppets melt like the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” As the children stare blank-faced, not so much in horror as in confusion, Wonka suddenly appears and gleefully squeals “wasn’t that great?!”
Wonka is, of course, a variation on a persona director Burton has explored many times: the lonely boy who seeks refuge from human contact in a world of imagination. Batman has Wayne Manor and the Batcave. Ed Wood has his movies. Jack Skellington, from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” has Halloweentown. Edward Bloom, the blowhard from “Big Fish,” has the tall tales in which he is always star. Wonka has his candy factory, a giant, hyper-Technicolor palace where chocolate flows in rivers past forests where candy grows. “Everything in this room is eatable!” Wonka helpfully explains, “even I’m eatable, although that’s called cannibalism, which is frowned upon by most societies!” Cows are whipped to make whipped cream, squirrels are trained to sort nuts, and pink sheep are sheared for reasons that an uncomfortable Wonka leaves unclear.
Wonka is completely liberated from human contact; the factory is manned almost entirely by a race of submissive and identical dwarves (all played by Buster Keaton-faced actor Deep Roy). Wonka’s explanation of how he found them in a jungle nobody’s ever heard of is so flatly unconvincing that I couldn’t help thinking they were the result of a “City of Lost Children” cloning experiment gone wrong. The patronizing sense of awe at the “pure imagination” of the 1970s Wonka is replaced with a sense of skepticism: the new kids are much more likely to say “what’s the point of that?” and to doubt that they’re seeing the real factory at all. “Is there anything here that isn’t completely pointless?” one of the kids mutters. I find this, if not more believable, than at least more amusing.
Page two of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Back to home.