[In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s
purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless,
but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE NEW WILLY WONKA PREQUEL IS FUN, BUT IT DOESN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO
ITS 1971 PREDECESSOR  
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Eileen Jones
December 19, 2023
Jacobin
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_ In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s
purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless,
but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie. _

Timothée Chalamet as the titular character of Wonka. , (Warner
Bros., 2023)

 

My prayer going into _Wonka_ was “Oh please don’t let Willy
Wonka be portrayed as just a nice young man with big dreams.” So of
course, that’s exactly what we get in the new musical prequel
[[link removed]] to the 1971 classic _Willy
Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
[[link removed]]_, in which Timothée Chalamet
takes on the title role. But an important correction — Chalamet’s
Willy Wonka is a nice young man with big dreams _and _floppy
hair _and_ large melting eyes so that young women can sigh over him,
and that’s the demographic driving the movie’s strong box-office
numbers [[link removed]].

It hardly matters to Chalamet fans that he can’t really sing or
dance, though this is technically a musical. His sweetly aspirational
Wonka first comes ashore clinging to the mast of a ship and breaking
into a dull song about hope (or something) in an uncertain, quavering
tenor. In general, the new songs are terrible, except for a mildly
amusing, energetic one called “Scrub It.” It makes for a sad
comparison with the quite memorable one from the original 1971
version, written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, which included
“The Candy Man” (a big popular hit for Sammy Davis Jr), “I’ve
Got a Golden Ticket,” “Pure Imagination,” and “The
Oompa-Loompa Song.”

It’s impossible to watch a character named Wonka wearing a top hat
and colorful velvet frock coat and not to be haunted by Gene
Wilder’s brilliant, superbly confident portrayal of Willy Wonka in
the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel
that’s defined the character for decades. Wilder played the role
like a man possessed of a vision. It was Wilder who came up with the
main action of Wonka’s introductory scene, featuring the reclusive
chocolatier emerging from his factory before cheering crowds that go
silent as he limps stiffly and solemnly down the red carpet, leaning
on a walking stick that is revealed to be a comic prop when he
suddenly does a brisk somersault and rises with a smile on his face.

Wilder wanted to define his slightly scary genius character by his
complete unpredictability, and the somersault was only the start. What
children’s film has ever featured a more acidly ironic central
character, or one with a greater indifference to children’s safety?
We never do find out for sure, in the 1971 film, how many of those
awful kids with golden tickets actually _lived_ through their tour
of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

It was actually very astute psychologically, though. Children do find
adults strange and unfathomable, often very erratic creatures. But at
the same time, an entertaining and inventive and humorous adult can
seem like the best friend a kid ever had, and Wonka combines all those
qualities.

Writer-director Paul King, of the _Paddington_ films as well as the
cult-favorite comic fantasy _The Mighty Boosh_, doesn’t even
attempt to portray young Willy Wonka as someone who has the
combustible qualities of Wilder’s Wonka already in him. Presumably
that was ruled out from the start. So what’s the source of
fascination used to replace a mesmerizing Wonka in this version?

A two-ton truckload of plot. People like that amount of plot these
days.

For starters, plot-wise, we find out via flashbacks that Wonka was
trained to be a chocolatier by his understanding mother (Sally
Hawkins), as they traveled around by boat in search of amazing
ingredients. After her death, young Willy expands his exotic travels,
and finds even more far-flung substances, such as the four cocoa beans
he takes from Loompaland. That unfortunately turns out to be the
entire crop, which incurs the wrath of the Oompa-Loompas, who send a
small orange-faced, green-haired avenger after him. He’s played by
Hugh Grant in a comically snitty Brit performance being used to sell
the movie.

By making the representative Oompa-Loompa character quintessentially
upper-class British in language and affect, Paul King is presumably
trying to dodge the ugly colonial aspect of the Oompa-Loompa
characters as written by Dahl
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In Dahl’s original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies,
subsisting largely on a mash of green caterpillars and tree bark until
“rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of
Africa in packing crates to live and work, and sing and goof and
dance, in the chocolatier’s plantation, er, factory.

“It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was
racist,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview. “But it did occur to the
N.A.A.C.P. and others.”

The 1971 filmmakers also made major changes to the Oompa-Loompas’
background story and appearance, adding the orange faces and green
hair Dahl hated, but that persist in this new version. Though Dahl
would presumably have loved this new film’s character of the corrupt
chocolate-addicted policeman played by Keegan-Michael Key, who keeps
taking chocolate bribes and growing more enormous in each scene. Key
is terrifically talented, with wonderful timing, like most of the
comic actors in the film who are struggling to elevate the relatively
weak material. Rowan Atkinson plays a corrupt priest who houses the
three colluding chocolatiers in town (Paterson Joseph, Matthew
Baynton, and Matt Lucas), in the church guarded by five-hundred
chocolate-addicted monks. If you’re waiting to see the big action
scene based on that promising description, though, forget it — Wonka
never fights five-hundred chocolate-addicted monks. What a wasted
opportunity!

Not knowing that he’ll be going up against an entire chocolate
cartel, young Willy Wonka arrives in a city resembling a fantastical
version of nineteenth-century London, where he aims to set up a
chocolate shop. But he’s a naive fellow and is immediately scammed
out of his little bit of money. Soon he falls into the greedy hands of
Mrs Scrubitt (Olivia Coleman) — a riff off of the seamy Mrs Lovett
character in _Sweeny Todd_ — who gets Wonka to sign a room-rental
agreement in exchange for a place to stay on credit. He’s warned by
Mrs Scrubitt’s scullery maid, Noodle (Calah Lane), to “read the
fine print.” Wonka pulls open the accordion-pleated document loaded
with legalese, which is a reference to the contract in the 1971 film
that Wonka makes all the children sign before they can enter his
chocolate factory. Only, in that version, the writing is literally on
the wall. It starts off large and legible but gets so steadily smaller
none of the “fine print” language can be read by two-thirds of the
way down.

In this new version, Wonka signs the deal because, as we eventually
find out, he’s illiterate. That’s a strange, pathos-ridden plot
point that allows Noodle to bond with him while teaching him to read.
Her plotline is something about her missing parents, her apparent
abandonment at Mrs Scrubitt’s, and her mysterious heritage that’s
left her with a necklace bearing the letter _N_, a Dickensian device
that will surely lead her to at least one illustrious parent in the
end.

Having signed himself into indentured servitude in the basement of Mrs
Scrubitt’s washhouse, Wonka joins various other enslaved characters
who will comprise his team of helpers in making his chocolate shop
dream come true. There’s accountant Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter),
Lottie Bell the former telephone operator (Rakhee Thakrar), Larry
Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher), an unfunny would-be comedian, and, uh, a
couple of others I can’t remember.

If these characters don’t sound especially striking, you got the
right impression. They’re so nonstriking, in fact, that in the end
of the film, they get written out of any sequels. If a film franchise
emerges out of _Wonka,_ presumably only Chalamet in the title role
and Hugh Grant as Lofty the Oompa-Loompa are welcome back.

So it’s all a little dull, with everyone being so blandly nice
except for the Rogue’s Gallery of villains, who are so villainous
they make Snidely Whiplash seem subtle. But what the hell, it’s the
holiday season and people have to watch _something_. There are some
funny bits here and there.

At least, you might say, pointing out the bright side, Chalamet’s
affable young Wonka couldn’t possibly age into Johnny Depp’s
bizarre, Michael Jackson–inspired version of the character from the
2005 Tim Burton adaptation. If you keep that in mind, things are
really looking up with this new version!

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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