“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”

On my day off yesterday I watched, in installments, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which I recently picked up as a “pre-viewed” DVD at Blockbuster. I’m collecting all of Johnny Depp’s movies–if he’s in it, I’ll buy it, whether or not I’ve seen it, or, having seen it, would never watch it again. (Mostly, I like them. If not, I like Depp in them, at the very least. For example, I detested “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” but I still was struck by the role Depp played and how well he did it. And yes, I own it.)

I hadn’t seen “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I knew the book very well. It was the number one book in my elementary school library when I was in third or fourth grade–you had to sign up to get it and the reserve list was months long. I must have read it a dozen times. I can still recall it vividly and in substantial detail. This may be because as I got a little older and wiser, I became totally repelled by the story–especially the facile rationalization for slavery, the reverse snobbery and all the fat jokes. I never owned my own copy, and if you know me, you know that’s significant–two rooms of my four room house are dominated by bookcases. I saw the 1971 Gene Wilder movie version, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” exactly once and didn’t care for it.

I bought the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” DVD along with a number of others, but I didn’t watch it. I took it to the shelter where I work this past weekend, where it was greeted with joy and the shelter guests of all ages watched it twice. I mentioned the movie to my sister, who has two kids aged 9 and 11. “I didn’t like that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She thought it was “bizarre” and that Wonka was played “as a very disturbed adult man.” She mentioned the comments in some media reviews comparing Depp’s portrayal to Michael Jackson.

With all this to bias my point of view, I put the movie on with some trepidation. The outcome? I was very surprised by how much I liked it.

To begin with, I was most impressed with how faithful the entire movie was to the book, right down to some physical descriptions, many lines of dialogue, and the lyrics to the Oompa-Loompas’ songs, which are all Roald Dahl’s poems. Dahl’s British quirkyness and Tim Burton’s quirkyness work well together–mesh almost perfectly, in fact. The casting was perfect. Where the movie is less likeable, it’s for the same reasons that the book is. The Oompa-Loompas are still, ahem, undocumented illegal immigrant slaves who work for nothing but chocolate and supposedly are delighted with this paternalistic arrangement. (hmmph.) The reverse snobbery and sneering at fat people (not to mention Germans) remains intact. And Willy Wonka is a very bizarre character in the book, and not especially appealing. He’s appealing to kids because he owns a candy factory that he’s trying to give away.

I found Depp’s portrayal of Wonka to be extremely complicated and multi-layered. He seems to have started out by asking two questions: what kind of man would focus his creative genius on a monomania for candy-making, and what would someone be like who had walled themselves up inside a factory for 15 years without any human contact whatsoever, absorbed in his art? What we get is a man who speaks in a combination of ad jingles, memorized speeches, and scattered anachronisms, because he’s lost the ability to talk to other people extemporaneously. He improves through the film and that’s consistent, not haphazard–it increases as his interactions with the other characters progresses. Depp clearly telegraphs that some of Wonka’s oddness is contrived and that he’s plotted out more of what’s going on than he’s pretending. Where the film diverges most from the book is the background and ending about Wonka’s childhood (with his dentist father played by Christopher Lee), and the little “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” frame in which Willy Wonka himself ends up being redeemed by Charlie and the Buckets, who were doing fine without his largesse, and learns that he needs people and likes them, after all. That’s different from Dahl’s version–but I liked it. The parts of the movie I laughed at hardest were the flashback scenes and the ending (“All these years…and you never flossed.”). Wonka’s father ominously saying that if Willy runs away, “I won’t be here when you come back,” and then Willy comes back and the whole house is gone, a row house, leaving a big hole–and then the house turns up sitting all by itself in the middle of nowhere…I was laughing so hard, the cats put their ears back! But then–I confess!–when Charlie sees that Willy Wonka’s father has saved, and even framed, every newspaper article about his son, I got choked up.

The movie is so full of sight gags, in-jokes and sly references to other movies (Burton’s, Depp’s and others) I know I’ve only caught a fraction of them so far. There’s even a “Garden of Eden” riff with Charlie and the hyper-competitive Violet in the candy meadow–except that Violet snatches the apple out of Charlie’s hands, instead of giving it to him! Esther Williams, “Ben Hur,” many echoes of “Beetlejuice,” even a nod to Depp’s film “Nick of Time” when Charlie is shining what turn out to be Willy Wonka’s shoes. Most of this will fly right over the heads of child audiences, or for that matter, adults under 30.

The Golden Ticket winners are kept quite faithful to Dahl’s versions, but where they’re updated, it’s done very well. You had to love Mike Teevee’s black skull-printed T-shirt (howling skull on the front, skull and crossbones on the back). I loved the way the two girls were sizing each other up from the first moment. You can just see the wheels turning in both their heads: the girl who had to have the best and the girl who had to be the best, and they know only one will come out the winner. They give the boys one dismissive glance (no competition there…!) and that’s all. Very funny. The casting of the adults is all note-perfect, right down to the bit parts like the shop owner who sells Charlie his third and winning chocolate bar. Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor are endearingly sweet as Charlie’s long-suffering and over-burdened parents.

The special effects are terrific and seamless, to a breath-taking (the squirrels, especially) degree. There are a lot of funny lines (“I’ve got to be more careful where I park this thing…”) and funny sight gags (the leering corporate spies stealing the Wonka secret recipes had me on the floor).

It would never have occurred to me to compare Depp’s Willy Wonka to Michael Jackson, in any way, had I not read that comparison beforehand. I doubt anyone else would have done so had the movie not been released so close to the Jackson trial. I don’t really see any similarity except in the broadest general sense (self-isolated creative artist with personality quirks)–and I don’t think anyone involved with the movie intended there to be one. The quirks belong to the storyline–for example, Willy Wonka’s purple latex gloves look exactly like the examination gloves his dentist dad is wearing, as well as lab gloves and food handler gloves. For twenty-five years, Willy Wonka has been inventing and making commercial candy–let’s hope he was wearing sanitary gloves! And his clothing is based on the descriptions and illustrations in the book.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s opinions, especially people who remember the book well and/or were big fans of the 1971 movie version. I’d had no idea that movie had such an avid cult fan base until the minor controversy erupted about the new one.