directed by Tim Burton
screenplay by John August
after the book by Roald Dahl (1964)

115 min.

First some comments about the material.

Roald Dahl’s children’s books often feel improvised, which is part of their charm. A bit like Lewis Carroll, he makes up something whimsical and then watches it play out for a bit, then something else whimsical, etc.: episodic diversion. I remember that Matilda surprised me, when I first read it in 5th grade, for being so oddly paced. (I also remember that as being the first time I felt the warm satisfaction of confidently and seriously reading a book intended for younger children.) It doesn’t seem like Roald Dahl concerned himself, in these stories, with “pacing” per se. They find balance in other ways.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a particularly eccentric construction. Unlike Alice, who drifts away from reality on page 2 and by the next page is already down the rabbit hole, Charlie takes a very long time to get to the candy. Charlie’s home life and the golden ticket hunt, which clearly serve an expository function, take up a remarkably large chunk of the book. The factory tour itself, when it finally starts, seems to be both a candy-praising parade of nonsense and a one-by-one cautionary tale about parenting; not the most sensible combination, really. I’ve never quite bought the “lessons” in the book, since the moral order they imply is pretty well contradicted by the chaotic orgy of candy in which they are staged. Violet Beauregarde gets her comeuppance because she chews gum all the time – and she receives it in the form of wonderful, magical gum! The difference between Violet’s gum and Willy Wonka’s gum is just that we hate Violet; the only moral distinction drawn in the book is between kids who keep quiet and kids who annoy Roald Dahl. Augustus Gloop isn’t there to make a case against gluttony; he’s there because there’s a large audience for hating fat people and wanting to see them die.

Of course, he doesn’t really die, but that’s just Roald Dahl’s gift to the audience, so that we can, ahem, have our cake and eat it too. He slips it in at the end for those of us who felt a little guilty at enjoying death.

Readers enjoy Roald Dahl, I think, because he wholeheartedly indulges meanspiritedness in his fantasies, just like most people. Wanting to see annoying people die is right there alongside wanting to fly – good fun in the land of make-believe. And I’m all for it.

The movie itself:

The movie itself was good, but troubled because it was neither a faithful adaptation nor a coherent original vision. The first part, pre-Wonka, was the closest in spirit to the book. I thought the scenes of Charlie and his family were pretty near perfect in every way. Most of the time, when a movie tries to create a fairy-tale atmosphere, it misses the point by pushing that atmosphere in your face as a marvel to behold. It is a strength of Edward Scissorhands as well as this movie that they give the fantastic elements no more than their due camera time and emphasis. There were no Lord of the Rings shots (as far as I can remember) where the CGI camera swooped and glided through space, wallowing in the fantasy. Though the opening sequence, a long animated trip through the automated chocolate production line, was close, and in my opinion a mistake.

The big problem here is Willy Wonka. It’s tempting to say, “oh, Johnny Depp’s doing something crazy again!” but obviously he isn’t the only one accountable for what the movie itself seems to acknowledge is a conspicuously weird characterization. Tim Burton long ago established that he thinks it’s funny/interesting to juxtapose completely different aesthetic worlds and watch them undercut one another. Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas (not technically directed by Burton, I know) take this clash of aesthetic worlds as their subject matter, which is why they’re among his most emotionally successful films. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, too, is all about the wacky incompatibility of Pee-Wee with various genre scenarios.

So it felt suitably Tim Burton, to me, when a lot of mysterious atmosphere would be casually punctured by Johnny Depp’s screwy little Willy Wonka voice, a bit like Corky St. Clair’s attempts at stern manliness in Waiting for Guffman. The role of Willy Wonka is comparable to Bugs Bunny, or God: all-powerful wizard with an only-semi-explicable agenda. This movie filled that role with a character who kept betraying the atmosphere of his magic kingdom by being easily flappable, preoccupied, and, though ostensibly responsible for the magic, apparently also a bit bewildered by it.

I could justify this atmosphere-puncturing in several ways: 1) The movie, with giant sets and twinkling music, oversells fantasy that is much more matter-of-fact in the book; the flawed and confused Wonka brings it all down a notch. 2) The movie creates a character where none existed; the book’s Willy Wonka is little more than a personification and narrator of the surrounding whimsy, whereas the movie shows us just what sort of person would choose to cut himself off from the world and live in Candyland. 3) Willy is portrayed as damaged and fragile to fit in with the new storyline in which he is reconciled with his dentist father. This storyline allows the movie to have at least one character arc that resolves, something lacking from the original book but absolutely necessary. 4) The movie’s Wonka is just an additional funny note that doesn’t alter the basic workings of the story.

But I don’t think any of these is true. As I said earlier, the original book is eccentrically constructed and lives off its own peculiar sense of balance. Trying to “fix” that just leads to trouble: Johnny Depp’s Wonka-as-fragile-freak just doesn’t make any sense. This guy doesn’t know how to accomplish anything; the final scenes of the movie show that his whole scheme has been fairly half-assed and that he probably had nothing at all to do with the pseudo-moralist punishments of the various other children. In fact the movie gets several laughs out of meta-jokes, where Willy Wonka remarks on how frequently he seems to be having flashbacks, or seems uncertain how it is that his factory can have an entire wing devoted to fixing the puppets that broke earlier in the tour. It’s not his movie; he just works here. The screenwriter’s sense of whimsy gets in the way of Roald Dahl’s, and so too, I would say, do Tim Burton’s and Johnny Depp’s.

Gene Wilder’s extremely distinctive characterization in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) might not have been quite what’s in the book, but it solved the problem of keeping a flesh-and-blood character both ambiguous and all-powerful. That movie feels, like the book, like it might well be a tale told by Willy Wonka. Not this one.

But: the casting and design is all excellent, and for the most part this is really delightful. Lest that get lost in my complaining.

Last bit of complaining: the songs are a huge miscalculation. Dahl’s somewhat tedious rhymes are a clear reference to Struwwelpeter and all the dignified tradition of merciless poetry meant to scare kids straight. As I said, he twists it to his own ends: rather than “the sin of greed leads to hell,” his songs say “I hate horrible gum-chewing brats, they deserve to die,” which is a sort of joke, though I fear he may have taken himself quasi-seriously.

The 1971 movie understood this and provided some original, suitably nursery-rhyme-ish songs in the same tradition, to serve the same function (Dahl’s actual poems go on at great length and would be unendurable if sung). However, the new movie makes a garish point of not offering us nursery rhymes of morality. Instead, it presents selections from Dahl’s poems set in a variety of intentionally goofy pop-pastiche styles. The text-setting is awkward and very little can be understood. The numbers are staged as overblown dance numbers in keeping with the stylistic references (60s folk, techno-Latin, etc.) It seems like Danny Elfman thought “You know what would be cool? If I did this!” But 1) the audience is still aware of what actually belongs there, and this isn’t it, so this comes off as a pointless “hey, look at what we’re doing!” stunt, and 2) Danny Elfman chose to do something he doesn’t do very well.

I remember that upon leaving The Nightmare Before Christmas, my father remarked that Danny Elfman’s songs were “primitive,” and he meant it admiringly. Elfman has a knack for memorably blocky, bold musical choices. His orchestrations (by Steve Bartek) are always beautifully polished while the music itself is unapologetically disorderly. It makes for great incidental music, and in The Nightmare Before Christmas, it produced songs that, though far from elegant, seemed quite suitable for stop-motion skeletons to sing. But the man has no rigor, and text-setting requires rigor. These songs were kludgy and embarrassing, moreso because they made such a point of being wrong for the story to begin with.

Cover of the first edition: