film review: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

[calimac]

The films I want to see on opening weekend don't seem to overlap much with the films other people want to see then. Dahl's novel is one of my old favorites from childhood, and I've found Johnny Depp good in every film I've seen him in (in Pirates of the Caribbean he was just about the only good thing). The previous film had a superb interpretation of Wonka by Gene Wilder, but apart from a couple good tunes (oompa-loompa doopity-doo), I found it otherwise lax and unmemorable, both when it was new and when I watched it again a couple years ago. So to me a new take on this story, by Tim Burton yet, was an event. Yet it opened on about half as many screens locally as the average big new release, and when I got to the theatre I found it less than half full (mostly with small children who were well-behaved throughout, though down in a front row before the film started I could see a teenaged girl waving an open cellphone in the direction of the screen: I expect she was preparing to record the film illicitly). More cheering news: the previews were for films (mostly animated, plus March of the Penguins) which all looked at least modestly amusing, as opposed to the films previewed at the Lord of the Rings blockbusters, which looked uniformly repellent.

The results, I would say, were mixed, which in context was a bit of a disappointment. Except for a tacked-on ending, the plot stuck very close to the book, which was good. About 20% of what was added was a distinct improvement. I liked, for instance, updating Violet Beauregarde as a present-day conceited overachiever, even though that made her gum-chewing a bit incongruous. And revealing that Mike Teavee didn't even like chocolate, though a passing reference to his having gamed the system to get his Golden Ticket isn't followed up on. When Grandpa George starts swearing, Charlie's dad (I think) clamps his hands over the boy's ears: having the sound cut out at that moment was a clever touch. Having Grandpa Joe be a former Wonka employee made complete sense. I also liked some in-jokes and back references: Wonka using Edward Scissorhands-type shears to cut the ribbon opening his factory, and quoting "Good Morning Sunshine"; the use of the Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare during the TV candy-bar transmission, though the timing of matching it up with the action was incredibly bad. Johnny Depp gives an interpretation of Wonka entirely unlike Gene Wilder's but no further removed from the book. (Wilder was an unpredictable manic; Depp plays a child-like space case whose nervousness gives him away and who walks into the wall of his glass elevator at least twice too often. One reviewer called him a cross between Carol Channing and Michael Jackson.) Also, adequate solutions were provided to the two biggest problems: having Wonka make a surprising entrance that was totally different from Wilder's classic surprising entrance; and the problem of the ethnicity of the Oompa-Loompas. (In the book, they're loincloth-clad black pygmies. The first film turned them into green rejects from the MGM Wizard of Oz. This film made them more dignified jungle-dwellers who wear old skiffy spacewear in the factory.)

All these are virtues, but there were problems. Much of the book's distinctive language ("Nobody ever goes in ... and nobody ever comes out!") was lost in paraphrase. Grandpa Joe's leap out of bed was pathetic. The Oompa-Loompas are all played by one computer-duplicated actor, which makes them look disconcertingly like clones. I didn't enjoy the songs at all, and couldn't make out most of the words. The children are underdeveloped and their distinctive characteristics not followed through on (Veruca does not ask for a pet Oompa-Loompa, as she does in the book). Many of the additions don't work. Two in particular struck me as needless attempts to plug inconsequential holes in the plot: a pedantic argument between Wonka and the children as to whether it's plausible for the Oompa-Loompas to have improvised their songs; and a quick shot of Wonka and Grandpa Joe (but not Charlie) discarding the protective glasses they'd worn in the television room. It's a quick shot of a trashcan that only lasts a second, but why is it there at all? Did Burton worry that audiences would wonder what became of the glasses?

Burton seems less concerned about a lot of other small holes in the plot, such as why everyone just stands there like mute dummies, not even reacting in shock, as Veruca approaches the squirrels (somehow getting through a gate Wonka later has to open with a key). This is one tiny example of a problem I found throughout the film, and in a lot of sfx-based films: slack and lax direction of the actors. Too many scenes of them standing or walking around looking at blue screens. Too much of the lesser characters just occupying space and not doing anything. Too many slow or poorly-judged reactions to other characters' lines. I know that not every director can be Joel Coen, who makes every second count and every extra know exactly what his character is doing and why at all times, but in a world with movies like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona whose chief joy is the snap with which the lines are delivered, it's sad that there should be this kind of sludge.

Then there's the ending. Neither film simply wrapped up with the book's quick happy conclusion; both inserted the requisite "all is lost" false ending. Gene Wilder's mercurial Wonka gave Charlie a brisk good-bye and waved him off. Depp's Wonka, whom I thought at first said that Charlie could bring his family along to the factory, then says the advantage of going is that he can leave his family behind. Charlie, credibly and creditably, turns Wonka's offer down; Wonka calmly departs. Now, I didn't mind the insertion of a backstory for Wonka in which his career obsession is the result of being the candy-deprived son of an authoritarian dentist (ably played by Christopher Lee in the film's best performance), though it would have been better to leave his origin a mystery. But I didn't understand the father-son reunion scene. Wonka admits to Dad that he's never flossed since running away from home, and then they hug? Huh?

OK, not a bad film, lots of clever stuff, but with a little imagination it could have been so much better. If you're not as curious as I was, wait for the video.

Comments

re: Depp

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

In the previews I've seen, I'm not thrilled with the way Johnny Depp portrays Wonka, but I'll hold off final opinions until I've actually seen the film.

Depp talked with Jay Leno about TV shows for kids in the '60s and '70s, and the weird ways that those hosts would talk to kids. I could see his point, but I'm not sure it'll keep him from creeping me out overly much.

Re: Depp

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Depp's Wonka isn't at all sure how to talk to kids. He (Wonka, not Depp) is very nervous, he freezes up, he reads from cue cards, he switches gears abruptly. It was an interesting acting choice on Depp's part, but it's heavy-handed and not always believable. Wonka is so afraid of his father that he's incapable of uttering the word "parents" (he doesn't have any trouble with the word "father", though).

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Regarding the trashcan for the glasses -- without having seen it I'm guessing that this is a throwaway (n.p.i.) joke on themepark attractions with 3-D films. They hand you the glasses as you enter and ask you to place them in the "receptacle" as you leave. No matter how they dress it up, the "receptacle" is always recognizably a trashcan.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Possible. But I don't recall any previous references to the receptacle, and I don't believe it actually looked as much like a trash can as my wording implies.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Um, there are a few things here that I think you just get factually wrong. Both womzilla and I do recall Veruca asking for an Oompa-Loompa, though we don't see her whine about it at length. She is definitely shown sliding between the horizontal bars of the gate, which an adult couldn't do. (Her father could have asked a kid to rescue her, but it doesn't totally surprise me that he didn't think of it, and no one but Charlie would have done so anyway.) The "hacking the game" doesn't need to be followed up on, because it's explained in the scene in which the kid is interviewed for the news: he used his computers to figure out where a gold ticket would be. That combination of hubris and technological knowledge is the hallmark of his personality, and it does lead to his fate.

Then there is stuff which is arguable, but I think the good arguments are on the other side. I really liked the argument over whether the Oompa Loompas could spontaneously come up with the song, because that and other things to me hinted that Willie Wonka either had preternatural powers or set the whole thing up somehow, or both. The "other things" were often his reactions when things happened to kids--I thought a lot more of the direction and acting than you did. I thought it was subtle but implied many interesting things. Whereas Wilder's WW just didn't actively stop the kids or help get them out of trouble, that seemed more complex with Depp's.

Other points on which we disagree, I think, are more matters of taste. I'd certainly take your word for it that the action didn't match the use of Also Sprach Zarathustra well, but I was so bust laughing over the extended 2001 reference that I wouldn't have noticed even if I were more attuned to that kind of thing. And I really liked the grandfather's leap out of bed. I do agree that the film was slower than I had expected, but it didn't seem a bad thing to me.

The main thing we agree about is the ending. How post-1980s, therapy nation! As I told W. and supergee right after the film, I would have been much happier had WW stayed traumatized but decided he needed Charlie to make good candy, and so put up grudgingly with Charlie's ulp, urp, parents living in the factory. It reminded me of the end of the movie of Stephen King's Needful Things, though not as much of a travesty--at least both endings of Charlie were happy, whereas NT turned a debacle into a happy ending.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the prints we saw were different. I was waiting for and expecting Veruca to ask for an Oompa-Loompa, and she didn't. There was a perfect spot for her to do so, just before Augustus is seen drinking from the river.

Really disagree about the argument scene. The hint that this is a set-up is already there: it doesn't need to be pounded in like that. The hint of a set-up is also beautifully carried in the book at the delicious moment when Wonka suddenly realizes Charlie is the only child left and says "That means you've won." Won what? Charlie wonders, and this wonderment gives sparkle to the ending. Again, the film spoiled this and pounded it in with the repeated addition of the announcement that one of the children would win a special prize. The Wilder film just deleted that whole business.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I dunno--unlike the bowdlerizing of the book you and Womzilla discuss, two prints of the movie seems unlikely. I recall Veruca's request as just one quick line in the middle of a scene in which the focus was elsewhere, and it could easily have been missed. If I see it again, which is unlikely but not impossible, I'll see if Womzilla and I were wrong or what. I can see your point about a lack of subtlety, but I don't necessarily see that as a flaw int his type of film. Also, I thought much, much more of Depp's acting than you did, and I liked a lot of his facial expression during the argument scene. (I almost said "mugging," and in a way that fits, but in a way it's too exaggerating a term for his acting.)

Different editions?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I re-read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last week and was very surprised that the text specifies that the Oompa-Loompas have "rosy-white" skin. I, too, remembered them as dark skinned, and the illustrations aren't particularly racially specific. I was expecting something as offensive as the darkies in the early editions of Dr. Doolittle. Perhaps there is more than one edition of the text?

I was also surprised by the degree to which I disliked the ending of the novel--not in that Charlie gets the factory, which is fine, but in its weird combination of abruptness (it comes, unearned, out of nowhere) and anticlimax (because it takes several pages to unwind, pages in which nothing interesting happens). The downbeat false ending of the first film adaptation makes the eventual triumph seem all the sweeter, and I compliment its screenwriter (uncredited on IMDB) for the changes. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending of the Burton adaptation.

Re: Different editions?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There must be indeed. I have, and have only ever read, the Knopf 1964 hardcover, which I believe is the first American edition, and this is on page 73:

"Their skin is almost black!"
"So it is!"
"You know what I think, Grandpa?" cried Charlie, "I think Mr. Wonka has made them himself -- out of chocolate!"

And at the bottom of the page, an illustration by Joseph Schindelman of five very dark Oompa-Loompas, dressed in what look like short white togas.

You write of "several pages to unwind, pages in which nothing interesting happens," which makes me think there must be multiple editions of the ending is well, because in my copy the ending is very fast and action-packed. The Oompa-Loompas' elegy to Mike Teavee ends on p. 149, Wonka says "you've won!" on the same page, pushes the UP AND OUT button on p. 151, spends pages 153-6 looking at the other children leaving, offers Charlie the factory on p. 157, insists on bringing his relatives along on p. 158 ("There's no time for arguments! We must go at once and fetch the rest of the family -- Charlie's father and his mother and anyone else that's around!"), crashes through their roof on p. 159, gets everybody in the elevator on p. 161, and the story ends at the top of p. 162. At a guess the whole sequence is less than 3000 words.