Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
by Directed by Tim Burton
Published on September 21st
Director Tim Burton was an inspired choice for the re-make of the film of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Family, Puffin's most successful title ever. Dahl doesn't do subtle and the cartoonish sensibility that shows the Buckets' house as a wildly rickety, impossibly functioning structure at the other end of the street from the eponymous factory is just right.
The film, like the book, is so the opposite of PC it's practically a Mac. Who could get away now with calling a man Wonka, for example? Or a fat boy Gloop? Or have such a fat boy in the first place? Burton goes just that bit further, with Augustus Gloop's German home being a sausage butcher's.
There are two European recipients of the famous Golden Ticket: Gloop in Germany and Veruca Salt in England. Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee are all-American as is Charlie Bucket. Which is odd, because Freddie Highmore, who plays Charlie, is English, as is most of his family ® mother Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's wife), grandmother Liz Smith etc.
And Freddie not only gets to say –candy” quite a lot, when an English child would say –sweets” he also says –Band-Aid” instead of –plaster.” This is clearly a film made primarily for an audience of American kids, which makes it all the more extraordinary that Johnny Depp refers to a failed line in sweets as –little bougers,” i.e. what we would call –bogies.” I think it was a valiant attempt to say –buggers” in an English accent (his father is Christopher Lee, after all, in this version).
Linguistic anomalies aside, the film is extraordinary is every way but the weirdest and most wonderful thing in it is Depp's Wonka. He plays him in a girlish bob and artificial gleaming white othodontised teeth, with a frock coat to show off his slim figure and a top hat and shades. He plays him in fact just slightly south of Michael Jackson.
Paradoxically, he is less spooky than Gene Wilder in the earlier film, who really did come across with a strong whiff of paedophile. Or at least child-catcher. He is messed up, no doubt about it, with a dentist father who made him wear a head-brace out of science fiction and burned his Hallowe'en sweets. A nice touch but the reconciliation scene at the end is also made weird by having Wonka's childhood home standing alone in a snowstorm, suddenly detached from its terrace. What does that mean? Making up with an estranged parent is an experience out of time? Who knows.
The script is excellent. –Nothing goes better with cabbage soup than cabbage,” says Mrs Bucket cheerfully when her husband doesn't bring home anything more sustaining. –I don't care,” says Wonka when told –I'm Violet Beauregarde.” This Wonka is disdainful and confused by turns. He appears not to like children in general ® wisely if these four dreadful specimens are typical.
The special effects are as special as you could wish ® an amazing glass elevator and a factory a bit like the planet Magrathea, which was the best part in the recent film of HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And the Oompa-Loompas. Ah yes, the Oompa-Loompas. There really is no way of making them acceptable, even though Burton's Busby Berkeley routines with thousands of clones of the one diminutive Indian actor, Deep Roy, are as beguiling as it gets.
These are little slaves brought from the jungle, paid in cocoa-beans, whose food at home in their own mud-hut and grass skirt culture is disgusting pounded-up caterpillars. It's amazing that Dahl ever got away with it and I don't think even Burton does. Making the corner-shop proprietor who sells Charlie the chocolate bar with the Golden Ticket a sympathetic big black guy doesn't really go far enough.
But just as the film is not set in a real place it isn't set in a real time either. Wonka explains that one of his confections will grow you a beard. –Why would you want that?” reasonably asks Mike Teavee, given that neither he nor Wonka wants to grow up, and he gets a list of hippies, beatniks (I'm sure I heard that) guitarists etc that puts us firmly in the 60s.
Grown-up females will go just to perve over Johnny Depp, who can't be made unattractive even with false teeth. And it is a virtuoso performance, as virtuosic in its way as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. The camera just loves this man; there isn't a moment when he is on screen which isn't electrifying. And there's a nice little –homage” to Edward Scissorhands when he first appears wielding the big pair he uses to cut the ribbon at the opening of the factory.
What children make of it, if the ones in the cinema I went to are anything to go by, is something else. There was a collective gasp when the Golden Ticket was found, just as if they were really happy and surprised for Charlie. Does that mean they haven't read the book or that they are just more inside the whole film experience than adults? Whichever, I can't imagine this film will ever need to be re-made. It is the authentic Dahl experience. Apparently he wanted –edge” in the form of Spike Milligan as Wonka and was disappointed with Gene Wilder. Well, nobody does edge better than Tim Burton and Johnny Depp together.