July 15, 2005

I’d like to say Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY plays better now than it did then, but for me it’s the reverse. I can guess based on some costumes I saw when I went to see the 2023 movie WONKA that there are people who grew up on this one and still like it, but for people my age I felt alone in believing it even had some good qualities. It was disappointing because I had faith that Depp would have an interesting take on Wonka, and that faith was not rewarded. But I could point to many things I liked about it, so I felt a little protective when people said it was worthless.

I’m partial to both the 1964 book by Roald Dahl (or at least the version of it that existed in the ‘80s) and the 1971 film by Mel Stuart starring Gene Wilder. After a teacher read the book to us in class I decided Dahl was my favorite author – I read James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Danny the Champion of the World, The Twits, George’s Marvelous Medicine, The BFG, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, I’m not sure what else. I remember waiting what seemed like forever for The Witches on inter-library loan, and it was worth it. His dark sense of humor really appealed to me. His descriptions of awful people next to those scratchy Quentin Blake drawings. When I found out he wrote “Lamb to the Slaughter” (the short story turned into the Alfred Hitchcock episode about the woman who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb) I was amazed. When I found out he had a book for adults called Switch Bitch I giggled. (But I never read that one.)

I vaguely remember seeing WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY for the first time on cable at the babysitter’s house. I don’t think I’d known there was a movie. I assumed it was current, didn’t know until I was older that it came out before I did. I watched it many times at all different ages, coming to appreciate its famously menacing slasher movie undercurrents in children’s movie packaging, along with everything else about it.

But I also loved Burton, who in 2005 had only really completely fumbled with PLANET OF THE APES. I thought BIG FISH was the Tim Burton movie for people who think Tim Burton movies are too weird, but I kinda liked it anyway. At that time the idea of him doing this story seemed like a dream come true, and Depp was still a brilliant actor reuniting with his EDWARD SCISSORHANDS/ED WOOD/SLEEPY HOLLOW director for the first time since becoming Captain Jack Sparrow. It didn’t seem like it could go this wrong.

The script is by John August, known for GO and the two CHARLIE’S ANGELS movies, but he’d done BIG FISH. I did and do appreciate him using parts of the book that were not in the earlier movie: Mr. Bucket (Noah Taylor, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER)’s job screwing on toothpaste lids, the story about Wonka making a chocolate palace for Prince Pondicherry (Nitin Ganatra, BRIDE AND PREJUDICE), the squirrels. In theory I like that all but one of the songs in the movie come straight from the rhymes in the book (except they just don’t make great songs, and in one case the music is criminally cheesy). I also like some of the new parts they invented like Wonka’s scary dentist father (Christopher Lee, ATTACK OF THE CLONES) and Charlie turning down the factory until he’s allowed to move his house and whole family inside.

My favorite addition remains the most memorable scene for me: when the factory gates open for the contest winners a little stage opens up with a show of It’s a Small World inspired animatronic dolls singing an annoying song about “Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka, the amazing chocolatier.” At the climax of the song there are some spinning sparkler pinwheel things but they cause the dolls to catch on fire and horrifyingly melt as the recording gets garbled and slows to a stop. Then suddenly Wonka himself is standing among the kids delightedly applauding the show.

(And I had forgotten this but much later there’s a gag about the factory having a burn ward for dolls.)

The highlight that persists for more than one scene is the choice to cast Droopy McCool himself, Deep Roy, as all of the Oompa Loompas, digitally shrunk down to doll size and acting in many different roles including as Willy’s psychiatrist and (in one of the best gags) revealed on screen at the end as the guy who has been narrating the movie the whole time. (The actual voice is Geoffrey Holder of BOOMERANG and the 7-Up commercials. A good choice, though I thought he was Christopher Lee.)

Despite the fairly ugly poster above this is a nice looking movie, with great production design by Alex McDowell (THE LAWNMOWER MAN, THE CROW, CRYING FREEMAN, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, FIGHT CLUB, also director of Sade’s “Paradise” video). I love the lack of era specificity, the German expressionist angles of the Bucket family shack…

…(Burton definitely sketched that one), the weird Wonka factory bicycles, the all-white TV room and goggles. And though it doesn’t make this one better, it is nice to see a much lusher version of the chocolate river and candy plants, which look cheap and inedible in the original.

It’s also great (in fact Oscar nominated) work by costume designer Gabriella Pescucci (ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, VAN HELSING), making the Buckets look Dickensian but giving the Beauregardes matching powder blue velour joggers and puffy silver jackets.

By the way, Missi Pyle (JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS, HOME ALONE 4) deserves more to do as Violet’s mother, but she stands out with her weird smiles and quasi-empowering slogans about being a “winner” and a “driven young woman.”

The kids are all perfect in their roles; maybe Burton doesn’t get enough credit for being good with young actors. Freddie Highmore (Charlie) was recommended by Depp, having been in FINDING NEVERLAND, and this actually led to a prolific career as a child actor, including starring in the ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES series and voicing Astro Boy, before playing Norman Bates on Bates Motel and then starring in The Good Doctor for seven seasons. The other breakout is AnnaSophia Robb, who played Violet Beauregarde. She was later in BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA, RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, and SOUL SURFER, but around here we recognize her as the co-star of REBEL RIDGE.

The main later credit for Jordan Fry, who plays Mike Teavee, is as one of the voices in MEET THE ROBINSONS. But he’s a really good take on the character, looks like some kid in a ‘90s fruit snack commercial or some shit and with a bratty teen boy aggression to him. He brags that he hates chocolate, and his response to the candy plants is to run over and start stomping on one of the mushrooms.

Some of the, uh, old-timey cultural depictions are not great. I don’t know about the market in Marrakesh where people trade livestock for Wonka bars. And I’ll see what CJ says about the Gloops as representatives of Germany.

I do strongly believe that this candy store in Tokyo is really cool looking.

I noticed sometimes on Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) and Wonka, and possibly on some of the other children, that there seems to be a digital airbrushing effect to make their complexions perfectly smooth, almost like porcelain, or like Campbell’s Soup kids, and maybe even enhancing the perfection of their teeth and wideness of their smiles? I felt then and now that it looks creepy, and I think we all agree on that, but to me that was clearly the intent, and I appreciate it. Others surely disagree. I can at least say definitively that this was a novel visual effect that has not become a cliche.

The opening credits very much mirror those of MARS ATTACKS!, which used computer animation to depict the factory-like gathering of flying saucers to invade the earth. This one is many thousands of chocolate bars being manufactured, golden tickets being placed inside five of them and packed to be shipped to five different cities, and Danny Elfman’s music has a similar feeling of escalating menace.

So yes, there are many individual facets of this movie that I admire. The deadly flaw remains Depp’s performance as Wonka. I thought at the time that he was riffing on Michael Jackson, which I still suspect, but maybe to less of an extent than I thought at the time. There also seems to be a little bit of Pee-wee Herman in his voice, which is always a mistake for anyone who is not Pee-wee Herman. Mainly his take is that Wonka is a stunted recluse. He talks like a shy little boy and also hasn’t really talked to anyone for many years (which seems disrespectful to the Oompa Loompas). The joke that Wonka is kind of crazy and pretends not to know he’s scaring these people with, for example, his Great Glass Elevator that’s about to crash through the ceiling, mostly feels more calculated than when Wilder did it.

For me Depp’s Wonka now plays no better than it did at the time, possibly worse (my feelings toward Depp no longer being charitable), and therefore the telling of this classic story sort of falls apart too. We still have the benefit of the nice, humble, poor kid winning the contest. For the first time the scene of Mr. Salt (James Fox, THE MIGHTY QUINN) buying up shipments of Wonka Bars and having the employees of his nut factory unwrap them all day struck me as, you know, practically a documentary. One family uses their business empire to buy a ticket while another eagerly follows the news on a black and white TV with a coat hanger antenna and in a newspaper pulled out of the garbage.

But when Wonka is completely off-putting and annoying even to us, when we don’t feel like we’re on his side (and there aren’t any sweet songs to make him seem like he has any positive qualities other than his candy-inventing vision) it creates a strange situation: I start feeling sorry for those little monsters, like it’s not really their fault they’ve turned out this way so far and I don’t really want to chuckle along with some horrible weirdo scaring them. The story seems a little too mean. I never felt that way before.

It does at least help that they have the scene from the book with the kids leaving the factory, transformed but alive. Violet being more flexible and doing animated gymnastics, and post-taffy-stretcher Mike looking like a flattened, gawky teen really made me laugh. For what it’s worth there are other dumb little jokes I enjoyed throughout the movie, like when Grandpa Joe (David Kelly, MEAN MACHINE) flashes back to 20 years ago when he worked for Willy Wonka and he’s already a very old man…

…or when Mr. Bucket gets a new job repairing the machine that replaced him in his previous job, or when young Willy Wonka (Blair Dunlop) appears to be part of a globetrotting montage but he turns out to just be visiting a “flags of the world” exhibit.

Ha, that’s a good joke.

I did not remember this, but CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY got good reviews? 83% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, anyway. It had the widest IMAX release up to that time and became the eighth highest grossing movie of 2005 (seventh in the U.S., fourth in the U.K.).

Dahl is credited as the writer of the original WILLY WONKA but he actually just wrote an outline, and he hated the uncredited rewrites by David Seltzer (THE OMEN) and Robert Kaufman (DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE, FREEBIE AND THE BEAN), as well as the casting of Wilder and the score, which he found sappy. The Dahl estate started trying to do a new version in the early ‘90s, with pretty good taste in directors – Spike Jonze was on their short list. Scott Frank (OUT OF SIGHT) wrote a screenplay at one point, with Nicolas Cage briefly attached to star, which now seems like such a missed opportunity. Damn. But the director was going to be Gary Ross (PLEASANTVILLE), then Rob Minkoff (fucking STUART LITTLE). Then holy shit they got Martin Scorsese… until he left to do THE AVIATOR. Warner Brothers president Alan F. Horn said hey, don’t worry, I have an ace in the hole. An Ace VENTURA in the hole called Jim Carrey as Willy Wonka directed by Tom Shadyac! But Dahl’s widow Felicity said abso the fucking lutely no god damn way in hell (in polite British) and thank god (it seemed at the time) they all finally agreed on Tim Burton.

But, shit, here we are. At least WONKA was surprisingly good. And at least we who are not Roald Dahl love the earlier version. A bigger tragedy than the lack of a second good CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY adaptation is that Burton has remained mostly stuck in this mode of glossy/messy i.p. adapter. He has since movie-fied a famous musical, riffed on two Disney classics, adapted a TV show and his own short film and a YA novel and did a sequel. The closest to original projects in the subsequent decades were CORPSE BRIDE (inspired by a folk tale) and BIG EYES (based on a true story). I didn’t hate most of these but didn’t love any of them like I do his earlier movies. I think I’m alone on this but I believe the best of them is DARK SHADOWS, also starring Depp as a pale weirdo and written (partly) by August.

tie-ins:

There were many CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY action figures and toys, including an 18” talking Willy Wonka recently listed at $341.26 on ebay (but it didn’t sell). There were also collector cards and a video game for PlayStation 2. The weirdest thing I found is a reproduction of Wonka’s cane filled with candy, but it’s from a numbered limited edition of 2000 so that is listed for $1,500 with the warning “Obviously the candy IS NOT FOR COMSUMPTION after almost 20 years of the making of the movie. Again, CANDY SHOULD NOT BE EATEN!”