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Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory
Like so many of my generation, memories
of Gene Wilder's eccentric but ultimately
charming Willie Wonka danced in my head
as I watched the second incarnation of
Roald Dahl's most famous kiddie tale.
But I still had high hopes that the combination
of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp would “get
it right,” based on their three previous
hit partnerships (Ed Wood, Edward
Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow).
If anyone could come up with a successful
remake of this off-beat, iconic, baby-boomer
cult film, surely it would be this team.
Wrong!
Irrespective of its gigantic opening weekend
box office, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory is a bad movie and this
summer's a bummer! First, we had Batman
Begins, Chris Nolan's recent psychological
treatise masquerading as a comic-hero
flick, followed by the more puerile and
standard Hollywood- issue Fantastic
Four. Now comes this gigantic mess
of a movie purporting to explain why Willie
Wonka dresses like an Edwardian dandy
while sporting Anna Wintour's hair-do,
Carol Channing's giant white sunglasses,
and Michael Jackson's voice. It was all
his dad's fault, you see. Shades of Anakin
Skywalker!!! Poor Roald must be rotating...the
book set out to reward Charlie, not to
explain Willie.
The
Burton/Depp Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory is a quagmire of odds and
ends, bits and pieces--some of them Dahl's,
some Burton's, and some only God knows!
The overall effect is that of a
Tim Burton film--all dark and scary-funny--crossed
with some CGI commercial from Target or
Marshall's featuring all those same-faced
Oompa-Loompas played by the exceedingly
uncharismatic Deep Roy and digitally choreographed
by the ghost of Busby Berkeley. Given
the enormous technological potential at
Burton's command, it's sad that the best
he can come up with is this version of
the Times Square Toys ‘R Us emporium on
steroids.
There
are moments to be sure--how could there
not be with that much talent at the helm?
The opening credits portray chocolate
as a deep, dark, nasty-looking-- almost
excremental substance--rather than the
usual light and milky confection, raising
hopes (alas, false) that this will indeed
be a dark and nasty version of Dahl's
morality tale. Ditto Charlie's hovel
and its inhabitants--the very best part
of the film as far as acting and intention
go. Young Freddie Highmore is the
perfect sweet-faced "nice" boy
to offset the brats who follow, while
the redoubtable David Kelly looks like
a Hummel statue grown old and extremely
brittle. Also wonderful is the grotesque
puppet barbecue that welcomes the children
at the gates of Wonka's place, coupled
with scenes of the factory's phantasmagorical
machinery (itself a graphic, novel knockoff
of Burton's own vision of Gotham City),
but that's where the myriad self-referential
in-joke elements begin.
Wonka
sports a Scissorhands pair of shears to
cut the ribbon at his factory opening,
while the factory machinery itself recalls
Vincent Price's laboratory in that same
film. Hammer horror star Christopher Lee
stands in for Price as Wonka's estranged
dentist dad. Charlie Bucket's Dickensian
hovel (a leaner like those in Sleepy
Hollow ) is the only such edifice
in the whole city, and as Charlie's stalwart
mum, Helena Bonham Carter wears a variation
of her Planet of the Apes makeup,
complete with bad teeth.
The
whole film plays like one big variation
on Burton's Big Fish tale of
family dysfunction. This time out,
it's Charlie and his loving family versus
Wonka and his bad dad and those four rotten
kids with their out-of-it parents. So
at heart, it's really just a big family
(or families) odyssey, emphasis
on the ODD. Burton also tacks an
extra happy ending for Wonka onto Dahl's
own happy ending for Charlie, all of which
simply goes to prove that bigger is not
necessarily better--ever!
Leslie (Hoban) Blake
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