A Little Nonsense Now and Then Relished By the Wisest Man

Rating: 7/10 (17 July 2005)

There are two ways to take Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with respect to this review's title: a line sung by Gene Wilder's Wonka in the original, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first is that even though the remake is largely nonsensical (not just a little bit), it is still relishable when placed in the spectrum of all of life's gravity.
Indeed, Johnny Depp's impish characterization of Wonka plays very well to children--much better than to adults; though, I heard plenty of adults laughing at the pure slapstick of his walking into the invisible doors of the glass elevator....twice! While the visuals are quite remarkable, there is little to hold the movie together besides the storyline of the Dahl book, which honestly, I cannot easily separate from the original movie.
Yes, the same thing could be said about the original; we go from chocolate room to inventing room to golden egg room to TV room with little alacrity. The tonality of those original settings is as disparate as the settings of the remake. The difference--and it's an appreciable one--is that the masterful quality of Gene Wilder's Wonka holds it all together. Even if we feel like we're on a jarring ride in the original, Wilder's cool and collected Wonka assures the audience that it's going to be alright: even if we cannot see how. And in the end, we all are a little wiser for it.
Which brings me around to the second way of taking the subject line: the way Wilder sang about it in the original. We can relish the nonsensical parts of the original because they are juxtaposed so finely by the menacing wit of the rest of the movie. This juxtaposition simply isn't possible until the very end of the remake.
Johnny Depp's characterization of Wonka isn't bad, so much as his character is written too shallowly. This is never more apparent as when he repeats a none-too-acerbic observation of Mike Teevee's mumbling. Yes, we are led to believe that Depp's Wonka is scatterbrained--as is demonstrated when he launches into a scripted welcome of his guests after the same welcome had already been extended. But this just adds to the remake's inauthenticity, because Depp's Wonka seems acutely incapable of running a chocolate factory: something I never felt about Wilder's Wonka. The redundancy of lines via the scatterbrained characterization of Wonka felt like an intentionally lazy (or impotent) turn by the remake's writers.
There are more loose ends tied up in the remake than the original. We actually see the nasty Wonka kids leaving the factory in their altered states. We find out a little more about how Charlie's family actually makes the move into the factory. We learn how Wonka got into the chocolate business. And, we learn more about the Oompa Loompa's origins; though the surreal nature of the Oompa Loompa's identical appearance makes me almost wish I hadn't. *laughs* All in all, the remake is a little bit of tasty nonsense which I will only relish now and then: not persistently like the original.