Dark "Chocolate"

Noel Vera

Tim Burton's film adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved book "Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory" is a wondrous confection: smooth and
shiny on the outside, brittle and bittersweet on the inside. Anyone
who grew up on the 1971 movie by Mel Stuart (re-titled "Willie Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory") already knows the story: Willy Wonka
(Gene Wilder in the earlier version), world-famous chocolatier,
closed his factory to the public because industrial spies were
stealing his secrets; after many years he reopens the factory to
five lucky children--said children chosen on the basis of having
found one of five golden tickets hidden away in five of Wonka's
countless candy bars, distributed all over the world (Burton's
credit sequence shows this whole set-up with admirable economy,
following the creation of a candy bar from the mixing of the
chocolate to the placing of a gold ticket prior to wrapping) .

The earlier picture was an occasion for tacky production designs
(the Chocolate Room, according to Wonka "the heart of the factory,"
featured giant plastic lollipops and a river that look suspiciously
muddy) and sticky-sweet songs ("Who can make the sun rise? Sprinkle
it in dew?"). Perhaps the only interesting element was Gene Wilder's
performance as Wonka, which was surprisingly menacing, suggesting
that Wonka was perhaps insane (a Wilder specialty), pulling back at
the last moment to reveal his essential decency (yet another
specialty, one I'm not as wild about).

Burton's version doesn't seem so much like a remake as it does a
return to the original source, perhaps not in every detail but in
tone and spirit (the title, taken directly from the book, reflects
this: the story isn't Wonka's--Wilder was the only real name actor
in the earlier cast, and they probably decided to capitalize on his
role--but properly Charlie's). The songs aren't standard-issue
Hollywood-musical fare, but use lyrics taken directly from Dahl's
book; the humor is sharper, the sentiment more understated, and I
think it's significant that you can't really tell if this film's
particular emotional tone is more Dahl's or Burton's--they seem so
much like kindred spirits in their various works (if I had to think
about it, though, I'd say Dahl had more teeth).

The design and sets are ravishing, of course, as can be expected
from a Burton film. The factory's outside resembles a wintry Fritz
Lang fortress, complete with towers and snow-swept stone façade; his
Chocolate Room is a vast chamber full of spun sugar and sculpted
gelatin and not a little mystery (the chocolate falls and river look
thick and gooey--as good chocolate should look--and the boat
hollowed out of a single giant boiled sweet really does look like a
giant boiled sweet). Charlie's humble house is wonderfully rickety,
complete with giant bed and four aging grandparents dominating the
living room (a detail from the book brought to perfectly grungy life
here) and a little attic retreat for Charlie, the hole in the roof
serving as picture window for peering up at the factory atop a hill.

It's a lucky thing Depp enjoyed his experience with Freddie Highmore
in "Finding Neverland" and recommended that Highmore play Charlie;
this is, after all, is the boy's story, his casting is crucial, and
Highmore more than fills the necessary shoes. He has the all-
important quality of directness, of being able to portray simple
virtues like honesty and decency without a hint of self-
consciousness or fuss (I have to go back to Joel McCrea to think of
another actor like that). The casting of Depp is more problematical--
I've come to expect miracles of Depp; after a period of looking for
roles with substance (he was the exact opposite, trying to act
alongside a magnificently exhausted Al Pacino in "Donny Brasco"),
he's hit upon the trick of saving entire productions with a single
idiosyncratically entertaining supporting performance (I'm thinking
of his stylish CIA agent in the otherwise dull "Once Upon a Time in
Mexico;" practically everyone else, and I suppose I'm included, is
thinking of his playing Edward Teach as Katherine Hepburn in the
otherwise dire "Pirates of the Caribbean"). This is more of a film
than any of the others he's stolen, and either he's intimidated by
the material and talent involved, or overconfident about his concept
of the character (I suspect the latter).

It's an engaging enough performance--Depp puts extra spin to his
response to the children ("Mr. Wonka, I'm Violet Beauregarde!" "I
don't care"), and displays enough twitches and grimaces and scowls
to open a museum. Burton gives him a wonderful introduction: an
elaborate audio-animatronic music show full of plastic figurines,
cheesy lyrics, and tinny music that breaks down and burns up in a
mini-apocalypse; it's as if Burton was referring to the earlier
adaptation and to all tourist-type shows (Disney--he worked with
them early in his career as an animator--in particular) and wanted
to say "this isn't going to be like that." For the rest of the
picture Depp sports Nicole Kidman's glossy hair and wears the makeup-
-actually it looks like the entire face, lifted whole--of Michael
Jackson (which he publicly denies; why, I wouldn't know--it's a
wicked parody). Wonka should be a fun performance, on par with
Depp's turn in "Pirates," but there he was working on his own, high-
wire style; here he's dealing with Dahl's conception, and he and
Burton have tinkered with the character radically.

Dahl's Wonka was wild, perhaps undependable--it's the ambiguity that
made him so intriguing--but you ultimately learn that he's actually
a quite sensible fellow, only he has to react and deal with Dahl's
lunatic world, and imagination (which gets even more lunatic in the
sequel, "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator"). Burton undercuts
even this much of Dahl's character; his Wonka could be one of the
four beastly children punished, only the chocolate-maker's crime
isn't gluttony, or arrogance, or gum-chewing, or TV addiction, but
an aversion to people, and parents in particular (which makes you
wonder why the golden ticket even bothers to mention that one parent
should come along). As with the Batman movies, Burton is trying to
subvert the idea of Wonka, the notion that he's a good sort (with
Batman, Burton gave us the ultraserious, understated hero of our
dreams, then pitted him against outrageous villains that made fun of
him and constantly stole the picture--and our attention--away from
him).

It should work (please skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the
film); Wonka's given a childhood trauma to chew on, and a
threatening patriarch (Christopher Lee--wonderful conceit, that his
father should be the Prince of Darkness) to loom over him; in
effect, there are not five but six kids wandering through the
factory, only in Wonka's case the parent is present only in spirit.
He even suffers the same fate as the four kids--his dreams are
undone by his own inner flaw, a flaw that (nice touch) our hero
Charlie reveals to him, through innocent-seeming questions that
trigger one flashback after another. Unfortunately, Burton suffers a
belated surfeit of good will, and gives both Charlie and Willy the
happy ending they, and I suppose we at some level, wanted, but
didn't necessarily (in Wonka's case, anyway) deserve. Burton already
upended Wonka's authority to punish the children by making him one
of them; Wonka needs punishment as well, something more severe than
mere rejection or what the others received, since he orchestrated
the whole thing in the first place (a confrontation with the four
children where they revenge themselves upon him might have been a
nice idea). Burton I think was going in an interesting direction
with the character of Wonka, only he failed to follow it through
(Dahl would probably not have hesitated to bring it to its grimmer
conclusion).

But aside from this one major flaw (a flaw that anyway is a daring
attempt to improve on Dahl's novel), I'd say Burton's film succeeds,
and on a level the earlier picture couldn't even dream of
approaching. Other than George Romero's equally flawed yet as
interesting and ambitious "Land of the Dead," I think it's the best
summer film of this year.

(First printed in Businessworld, 8/5/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)