Burton's Wonka a Near-Miss

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2005)

Most big-ticket summer movies leave one wishing they had been better, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no exception. It doesn't seem to matter how prodigiously imaginative these tent-pole movies are, how accomplished technically - something always happens to prevent them being truly satisfying. To quote the great philosopher Deion Sanders, it must be the money. So much is expended on producing and marketing a film like this, so much rides on the shoulders of such an endeavor, that the people undertaking one are forced inevitably to make decisions based on these economic realities rather than artistic vision - are forced to play it safe. I doubt seriously that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is, as it stands, the film Tim Burton would've made had he been free to do anything he wanted.
The story takes place in a world of Muswell Hill uniformity penetrated by glimmers of a gently eccentric charm. Young Charlie Bucket lives with his impoverished parents and four bed-ridden grandparents in a little crooked storybook house in the center of an empty lot; Charlie's a radiantly happy kid despite being forced to sleep under a huge hole in the roof, and having to settle for a single candy bar as a birthday present every year. The only ray of hope in Charlie's life is the dream of one day entering Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, the monstrous industrial-cathedral that towers over the dreary town, visible to his yearning eyes each night as he tries to sleep with the snowflakes blowing into his face. All Charlie needs is to find one of Willy Wonka's five special Golden Tickets, which have been placed in randomly selected Wonka bars and shipped to all corners of the earth. For days Charlie and his family watch the news despondently as bratty, undeserving kids claim the tickets: the gluttonous Augustus Gloop; the spoiled Veruca Salt; the generally overbearing Violet Beauregarde; and the deranged Mike Teavee. It is here that one is forced to engage in a bit of comparative criticism to best make one's point. In the original Willy Wonka, these early scenes were handled with a snide sense of satire, were given full weight by director Mel Stuart and producer David Wolper; Tim Burton, on the other hand, seems to rush through them as if they were nothing but silly business to be dispensed with before getting to the real stuff. There's a slight satiric edge to the portrayal of the bratty kids, the various ways their parents have of ruining them, but the first act overall seems perfunctory, like it was cut together with an eye toward just getting it over with. This is a shame, because it badly hurts the movie. The first Willy Wonka allowed for the slow building of anticipation - just who is Willy Wonka, and what is inside his mysterious factory - but Burton's film is in so much of a hurry to get to the good bits that we're never allowed to really settle-in, to absorb what we're seeing. There are marvelous images - the Buckets' architecturally improbable house; a Taj Mahal made entirely of chocolate - but it all gets to seem like so much wallpaper. I choose to believe that none of this is really Burton's fault, that the studio, concerned about a slow first act, made him cut the movie down. It's a good thing for them, and us, that the movie picks up considerably inside the chocolate factory, and gives us the crazy, kid-bashing kicks we're looking for.
The movie's best asset is its mean-spiritedness. Burton understands that the story is all about cutting vile little children and their equally repugnant parents down a peg, and he does so with the relish of a true sadist. The torture may come disguised as a series of lessons about good behavior, but let's not kid ourselves - the Oompa-Loompas aren't educating us about civility so much as dancing on the graves of the mean, selfish kids. Burton turns these sadistic demises into giddily bizarre musical numbers, the Oompa-Loompas all being portrayed by the same diminutive actor, Deep Roy, who has been digitally multiplied into an entire race of midget worker/moralizers. The chocolate factory on the whole is beautifully rendered; Burton doesn't really depart from the art direction in the first Willy Wonka, but he enhances it. The candy-land set with its chocolate waterfall is classically Burtonesque, the candy-trees twisted into the strange, curling vegetable shapes familiar from Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton may be working from Roald Dahl but the graphic style is all his, as are certain of the movie's underlying themes. For Burton Willy Wonka is a lonely odd-ball, an unloved outcast not much different than Edward Scissorhands, and it's Wonka's return to the world of humans, spurred on by the angelic Charlie Bucket, that provides the film its emotional underpinnings. Johnny Depp brings a sweet/sour goofiness to Wonka, the reluctant ring-master. Young Freddie Highmore stands alongside him as Charlie Bucket, whose moist-eyed purity never lapses into the sugary. There's real heart at the center of the fantasy, but for the fantasy to come fully to life the film needed to take its time. The real lesson of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is this - you can't rush wonderment.