Wonka
It always felt as though revisiting the world of Willy Wonka was a dog chasing its tail. 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” is beloved because it has a jet black humor at the heart of its colorful world of chocolate, fantasy, and unattainable dreams. There is something weirdly entertaining about Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” but even that seems like a pretender to the throne. This time around, the makers of “Wonka” are looking back at the beginning, and using Mel Stuart’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s tale as the template. Without Gene Wilder, and his delightfully twisted sincerity, as Willy Wonka, this film was always going to fall short, but director Paul King and star Timothée Chalamet find their own way into the original film’s charming facade, and the result is a winner.
The older he gets, I think I appreciate Chalamet more as an actor. When he was younger, you could see the talent in roles like “Call Me By Your Name” and “Lady Bird,” but personally, it’s a good idea to wait longer into a young actors career to see how they shift into adult roles. Is he noticeably older in films like “Dune: Part One” and “Bones and All?” No, but there’s a maturity needed for those roles that felt missing in his earlier work, and I’m finally on board. His Willy Wonka has glimmers of Wilder’s take on the role, but ultimately, he is his own incarnation. Sometimes, his singing of the songs is shaky, but the heart with which he embodies the role is absolute, making this film a charmer.
Even more so than Stuart’s film, King has made a full-fledged musical with a fanciful visual imagination. I’ll admit to not having seen his “Paddington” films, but I can understand why- if this is the approach he’s taken to those films- they are so beloved. Here, Wonka is coming to a center of the chocolate industry to peddle his wares, but he has three separate chocolate companies looking to take him down- Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton). He ends up as a resident at a local laundry cleaner’s building, where he signs on to more than he expected. Someone looking to help him is an orphaned girl who works at the building, Noodle (the lovely Calah Lane), who has some ingenuity to her.
“Wonka’s” primary goal thematically is to show the corrupting nature of capitalism, and how the rich give zero considerations to the poor. The screenplay by King and Simon Farnaby gives the actors plenty of room to play with these characters, especially the likes of Olivia Colman (as the wicked launderer Mrs. Scrubbit), Tom Davis as Bleacher (an oafish love interest for Mrs. Scrubbit), and Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police. The more ridiculous the characters are visually, the broader they get to be comedically, and counterbalancing that is Wonka and Noodle. They are the heart of the film, the dreamers hoping for a brighter tomorrow. Of course, there is also Hugh Grant as the Oompa-Loompa; Grant gets a lot of laughs as the droll orange truthsayer, and his connection to Wonka makes for a fun backstory to how the two crossed paths. And I cannot forget to mention Sally Hawkins, seen in flashbacks as Willy’s mother and Rowan Atkinson as a comedically-corrupt priest.
A musical is only as good as its songbook, and Joby Talbot (who previously scored “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Son of Rambow”) has an interesting time with this one. This is a very traditional song score, and one of his strengths is how Talbot does bring in the most iconic musical ideas of the original film, but veers off of them in a direction entirely his own. I love some of the new songs dearly- “A Hatful of Dreams,” “You’ve Never Had Chocolate Like This”- but even the ones that something of a mixed bag (“Sweet Tooth,” “For a Moment”) are still interesting enough to where you enjoy listening to them, and understand why people would enjoy them. King stages this film like an old-school, big-budget musical, but by having Chalamet at its core, he finds a unique heart for it that makes us feel like we’re watching a true work of pure imagination distinguished from what came before. That might be the most surprising part of this film of all.
