CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

By: Rachel Reitsleff
Review Date: Friday, July 15, 2005

When a movie of any genre totally succeeds in creating its own reality, viewers don't ask themselves real-world questions while it's playing and instead allow themselves to be immersed in the cinematic world. However, when a movie tries to create its own reality but, splendidly designed though it may be, has chinks that show, viewers tend to be jerked out of the story and start analyzing (maybe over-analyzing) just what the filmmakers were trying to do, along with recalling relevant bits of movie history.

Director Tim Burton's adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY cannot definitively be said to fall into one camp or another. It has an internal consistency, yet also contains glitches of the sort that are distracting. Finally, although any use of Christopher Lee in a fantasy film justifies itself, there's a plot thread that feels like the homogenizing hand of "development" has tweaked the work.

Anyone who remembers Dahl's book, or the 1971 WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY starring Gene Wilder, knows that it concerns a mysterious candy-maker who, after shutting out the world for 15 years, creates a contest to allow five visitors to his factory. Five golden tickets have been wrapped into anonymous bars of Wonka chocolate all around the world, promising a tour of the Wonka factory, with a special prize for one person at the end. Naturally, this sets off a Wonka bar-buying frenzy. In the end, four kids who are little monsters in different ways get the tickets. The last winner is Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore), a little boy so poor that his family can only afford to buy him one chocolate bar a year. Unlike the other children, Charlie is actually a decent and respectful human being.

In this version, the one-room cottage of Charlie and his family (parents and both sets of grandparents) is in staring distance of the chocolate factory. Moreover, Charlie's beloved Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) was a Wonka employee until rapid industrial sabotage caused the chocolate maker to dismiss all of his workers one of the things the world wonders about is just who has been making Wonka candy ever since, as the factory gates never open. However, open they do for Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the other ticket winners, who are greeted by Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) himself.

Charlie's bratty co-winners are in for some factory-based comeuppances, which are a bit grotesque though not truly over the top. The rhymes in Dahl's book, describing the punishments of the bad children, have been set to music and sung by CHARLIE composer Danny Elfman in a variety of '60s and '70s pop/rock styles, with Deep Roy as all of the unusual new Wonka employees doing an outstanding job of performing them onscreen.


The musical numbers are highlights, but they underscore a heightened self-consciousness within the film. Stylization is one thing, but Burton appears to be simultaneously copying and mocking kiddie films of the '70s. Some filmmakers do this sort of thing as naturally as breathing while it's a different genre, Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL movies effortlessly meld celebration and send-up. Here, however, mockery starts to loom a lot larger than tribute.

Part of this may be due to the script's insistence of providing Willy Wonka with a back story, of all things. Nifty though it is to include the iconic Lee in the proceedings, it feels like somebody's effort to counterbalance the snideness with sentiment. The result is less blend than very large portions of each.

Oddly enough, John August's script and Burton's direction seem most relaxed in the Bucket household, amiably sending up a poverty level that bypasses Dickens and comes straight out of Monty Python, yet with real affection for the characters. Highmore is delightful and Helena Bonham Carter and particularly Noah Taylor excel at appreciative deadpan contemplation of things like toothpaste-cap scale models.

Depp gives a completely fleshed-out performance, and some people are going to adore it. He essentially plays Wonka as a somewhat socially inept and self-absorbed 15-year-old girl, alternately surprised by and gleefully superior to the youngsters present. On the one hand, it seems likely that the intended effect was impishness combined with childlike innocence then again, maybe it's entirely deliberate. A lot of the press audience thought it was brilliant. What we don't get, though, is a sense that behind Wonka's mercurial surface is a genuine wizard we get the absent-mindedness, but not the shrewdness that we might expect to accompany it. To be sure, predictability is not often a virtue, but sometimes novelty for its own sake isn't necessarily a good thing, either.