Current mood:

unimpressed

I saw the new screen version of CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and didn't like it much. Though the filmmakers insisted they were keeping closer to Roald Dahl's original book than the 1971 film, they forgot one key fact -- the same one the first flick's creators ignored. In the book Willy Wonka is an old man, sort of an aged sprite if I remember correctly. At least that's my memory of Wonka's statue in London's Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, which was based on illustrations from the book's first printing. As people over forty have been banned by current Hollywood from appearing in movies as anything other than parental stooges, background action or occassionally, villains, hiring an actual septugenarian to play Wonka was, of course, out of the question. To suggest that Wonka be portrayed as the Yoda-like imp he was in the book, indeed, to suggest he be shown as anything other than a perpetual youth is tantamount to blasphemy. I can hear the studio execs now: "We've got kids coming to see this flick for god's sake! It's bad enough they have to endure that old fart Santa Claus once a year, let's not make Wonka a codger, too!"

I remember as a kid raising an eyebrow at the youth of Gene Wilder as Wonka in the first movie, but I wound up embracing the character anyway. There seemed to be a playful wisdom at work behind everything Wonka did, as if he not only somehow secretly handpicked each of the Golden Ticket winners but spent hours devising traps (and thereby sobering life lessons) for them. Wilder's Wonka seemed like an adult who had never lost a child's perspective of adults, and therefore knew how to skillfully parody them while walking among them. He dressed in the clothes a child might choose to give himself an air of wealth and worldiness among grown-ups, and even spoke to them on a semi-intellectual level until it dawned on the mystified adults that what they heard was an earful of nonsense and veiled insults. Yet Wilder also made Wonka an obsessive workaholic who saw human relationships as an impediment to his creative genius. It wasn't that Wilder's Wonka disliked children (though he clearly didn't care for the four out of five he invited in) but he had simply created a world where he had no time to have any kids of his own.

I bought that Gene Wilder's workaholic Wonka, as well as his aged counterpart in Dahl's book, had sacrificed family to follow their candy-coated muses and wound up, in part, regretting their choices. An old man looks back on his life and mourns that he has no family. Hence the elderly Wonka's search for an heir has gravity. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, with his Bettie Page bob, perfect teeth, ivory skin and Marilyn Manson fop attire, looks thirty, tops. If the latest Forbes poll of fictional wealthy characters can be believed, Willy Wonka ranks alongside Santa Claus and Scrooge McDuck as one of the world's richest individuals. So given that the new, impoved Wonka has money, looks and youth, what's keeping him from scoring a babe? He's too screwed up to get himself a wife or even adopt a kid as a single parent? Hell, if Bruce Wayne can do it...

An old shut-in giving out golden tickets as one last bid for immortality I buy, at least in the context of Dahl's original. But the idea of a young and we assume, virile Wonka not even attempting to forge a relationship in order to secure an heir I find harder to swallow than one of his own everlasting gobstoppers.

I also find fault with Wonka "re-imagined" not as someone who is in supreme control of his self-created world but a clueless prisoner of it. In the new film I never got the idea that Wonka was particularly smart or that he was always several paces in front of the other characters, which he always is in the book. His best scene comes early in the picture, in a flashback where Wonka shares a bit of chocolate-making magic with his then-employee, Charlie's Grandpa Joe. Sadly that bit of happy interplay is missing from the rest of the picture. Watching Depp smile like a Jerry Mahoney dummy and say "'Kay" or "that's weird" to the actions going on around him made him seem like he never knows what is going on in his own factory, nor does he really care. He seems like a pampered, sequestered celebrity who has been one from birth, so detatched from common folks that his reactions to the mishaps befalling his young visitors barely warrants a shrug. Nothing wrong with that if that was part of Wonka's put-on, but I got the idea he truly didn't care about anyone but himself and actively enjoyed torturing the five kids.

Which begs the question, why did Depp's Wonka want to give away his candy factory to a child in the first place? It's clear from the outset he hates kids, so I suppose forcing one to take stewardship of his nightmare sugar palace would be the cruelest blow of all. Violet Beauregard got off easy, first being turned into a blueberry and then a cross between a Slinky and Smurfette, compared to the horrors that innocent Charlie Bucket will soon face as the ward of Depp's capricious, bratty man-child. The film's ending hints at this as Charlie's humble shack is transported, filth and all, to the center of Wonka's chocolate room. Though Director Tim Burton attempts to create a scenerio where Wonka makes peace with his own childhood and essentially "grows up" to accept other people, Wonka ultimately forces them to meet him on his terms only as the movie suggests with its contrived and creepy fade-out.

I suppose my real problem was with why this movie was made at all. The 1971 film is great, a perfectly good translation of the book to the screen, unhampered by the screwy logic that Willy Wonka needed a traumatic backstory in order to flesh out his character. Wonka is a trickster, like Br'er Rabbit or Bugs Bunny. He's smarter than everyone around him and slyly waits for the arrogant or the violent to do themselves in. The trickster is justice in the form of a deceptively weak or seemingly foolish character. If you take away his tricks, or try and overexplain them, he becomes very ordinary very fast.

This device may work for a character like the Wizard of Oz who really is a humbug, but it's death for Wonka, who is the real deal. Also, I object to Burton's movie because it is part of a growing trend of remake for remake's sake. The current crop of studio execs, all in their mid to late thirties and all TV raised, look to the box as their sole source of inspiration. I recently had a Warner Bros. exec tell me as much, saying the fact that someone put a show on TV told him someone had faith in the original concept, thus it was a proven commodity, thus it was good. This being his justification for greenlighting the new STARSKY AND HUTCH and DUKES OF HAZZARD flicks, BTW.

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY was not a TV series of course, but during the 70's and 80's it was shown so often on TV, particularly around Thanksgiving and Christmas, that it drilled itself into the minds of impressionable Gen Xers and so became "a classic" worth remaking. Or to reduce it to blunt studio logic, lots of people know the original, so if it flops, it's a failure of the original concept, not of the talentless lunkhead who had no other idea than to okay this rather limp remake.