Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005) and
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971)
“If we’d had Milligan or Sellers romping through it and a hundred children playing the Oompa-Loompas, we’d have had a fantasy like The Wizard of Oz. But they ruined it.” – Roald Dahl, on Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)
One of the interesting side effects of the release of Tim Burton’s new take on Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that suddenly Mel Stuart’s 1971 adaptation is routinely being described as a “classic.” Since when? Although a staple of childhood viewing for three decades, I had never really thought of the film as particularly well regarded. It’s well remembered, certainly: its sheer garishness, and elements of creepy kitsch (such as the orange-skinned, green-haired Oompa-Loompas) mean it’s a film that sticks in the mind. Yet I always considered it deeply flawed, and welcomed the idea of an artist as talented as Tim Burton taking on a new version. As I wrote some time ago (here) Burton is a filmmaker whose sensibilities are ideally suited to combining the fantastic and macabre elements of Dahl’s material into a satisfying whole, as opposed to Stuart’s often-uncomfortable juxtaposition of jarring elements. What’s more, he had all the mistakes of the first version to learn from, and the benefits of modern technology. So it’s an immense surprise to find not only that Burton’s version is something of a disappointment, but also that on revisiting Stuart’s, it holds up better than I had remembered.
Dahl’s original novel is not quite his strongest book (I think both James and the Giant Peach and Danny, the Champion of the World are slightly better), but it is his most fascinating, mostly due to the central figure of Willy Wonka. Judging by accounts such as Jeremy Treglown’s biography Roald Dahl, Wonka is a heightened version of Dahl himself: a charismatic dreamer, showman and an inventor of amazing fantasies, but at the same time egocentric and callous in his dealings with others. That Dahl always hated Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Wonka – the one thing about the 1971 version that is almost universally praised – might be partly due to Dahl’s difficulty in coming to terms with some of the more uncomfortable implications of his own creation. Dahl arrived at children’s books via a background in macabre adult fiction, and this darkness never left his work: the confidence and abundant pleasures of his writing help cover the fact that, in its fundamentals, Charlie is a really odd book. It is essentially built around a series of industrial accidents that maim a number of unpleasant children: it’s like a twentieth century variation on the cautionary tales of Hilaire Belloc, played out at length and milked for maximum possible laughs.
It had been about a decade since I had seen Mel Stuart’s renamed adaptation Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and my overriding memory of it was of its awkwardness with the material. Coming back to it after seeing Burton’s version, I found this memory largely vindicated. If the novel was strange but confidently written, the film is if anything stranger still, but much less certain of its tone. Perhaps most conspicuously wrong are the musical numbers. Everyone involved seemed to be fixated on The Wizard of Oz as their model, which was reasonable enough (there are a lot of parallels between the two stories), but this shouldn’t have extended to making Willy Wonka a musical. The much-maligned team of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse provided undistinguished songs, and Stuart stages most of them without enthusiasm, almost apologetically. (Apparently he has even arranged for one – “Cheer Up, Charlie” – to be cut from some TV prints).
Also disconcerting is the general grimness of the film’s visuals, particularly with regards to the locations and production design. The film was shot in Germany, and the locations have a grey, depressing look to them. This carries through even to the factory sequences where, as Henry Blinder points out (in a great essay on the film in Danny Peary’s book Cult Movies 2), “no matter how fantastic the sights are, we can always see the dingy brick walls and antitheft, wire-impregnated windows that make the building like a prison.” And while the Oompa-Loompas have become one of the most recognisable, even iconic elements of the film, they really are grotesque – and not in a good way.
All of which is enough to stop the film from being the classic some are now portraying it as. Yet despite its flaws there is still a lot to like in the film: it’s a great example of how a film which ultimately doesn’t quite work can still be full of rewarding elements. I have already mentioned Wilder’s Wonka, and the praise given to this performance is fully justified. He catches the dual sides of Wonka expertly: whereas the rest of the film tends to awkwardly alternate the magical and the creepy, it is in Wilder’s performance that these sides of the film come together in a satisfying whole. Wilder’s Wonka is broad enough for children to enjoy, while adults will enjoy the shades in the portrayal, his understated throwaway humour, and his deliberately ineffectual attempts to save the children in peril. (When Augustus’ mother tells him that her drowning son can’t swim, he responds that “there’s no better time to learn.”) He is also the only performer in the film to really make one of the songs work, with his dreamy performance of “Pure Imagination.” His best moments of all come in the near-final scenes, as he tells Charlie and Joe that they have to leave, and Charlie passes his crucial “test.” This aspect of the plot is unique to the 1971 version, which also eliminated Charlie’s father to strengthen the sense of Wonka as a surrogate parent for Charlie. It’s therefore wrenching when Wonka is cruel to Charlie and Grandpa Joe, and a relief when it turns out he is a good man after all. These scenes simply would not have worked if it weren’t for the ambiguity inherent in Wilder’s performance.
It’s not just Wilder that makes the film worthwhile, however. I have already mentioned the favourable plot changes, but the quality of the script (written by Dahl and an uncredited David Seltzer) extends to the dialogue too. The film is full of great lines and little jokes, with much of the dialogue sharpened up considerably as compared to the book. A challenge with this material is making the pre-factory sequences lively, and the response here is interesting. Instead of making these sequences as short as possible, the filmmakers (I don’t know if it was Stuart, Dahl, or Seltzer) made the interesting choice to expand them, and the end result is a case study in the way inserting material can make a film seem shorter. The rapidfire jokes about the worldwide effect of Wonkamania lift the early sections of the film considerably, avoiding having us stuck in Charlie’s dreary world for too long at a time. While most of these scenes aren’t in the book, they’re reminiscent of the kind of silly jokes Dahl at his most lighthearted would indulge in (Dahl’s sequel novel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, is little more than a series of such sketches). The film also shows a lot of courage in terms of it style in individual scenes, with the boat ride sequence, in particular, notable for its courage in pushing the tone of the film to disturbing extremes. Most importantly, however, there is the quality of the relationship between Charlie (Peter Ostrum) and Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson). They bring a warmth to the centre of the film that, along with Wilder, is its key asset.
Tim Burton comes to the material with a head start, having seen Stuart’s not-quite-right version. That advantage can be seen in the things he gets right, as the new film generally solves the problems that bedevilled its predecessor. It’s much more even in tone, for example, and its design – as you would expect from Burton – looks gorgeous. Instead of the ugly and mundane German locations, Burton has given us an exaggerated, storybook version of industrial Britain that is perfect for the tale. The Bucket house is straight out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, while the interiors of Wonka’s factory are realised in bold, luminous colours. Those elements that needed updating have generally been brought off well. Mike Teavee, for example, is now something of a child prodigy, which makes him considerably more interesting: while as obnoxious as ever, he actually makes some good points as he heckles Wonka. Similarly, Violet Beauregarde is given some personality traits beyond her gum-chewing, and her character benefits from the change. Indeed, of the children, only Veruca Salt is disappointing compared to the original movie, being much less extreme this time around (more posh than spoiled). Burton is also able to fix things that couldn’t be done last time, reinstating the “Bad Nut” sequence for Veruca’s demise, and finding a much more satisfactory approach to the Oompa-Loompas. The Oompa-Loompas are now all played by one digitally reproduced actor, Deep Roy, and perform a series of original Danny Elfman songs. The songs’ lyrics are based on the wonderful chants from Dahl’s novel, and it’s fantastic to hear them (although unfortunately the sound mix for most of the songs obscures the words).
Unfortunately, despite its many gains on the original, the film has fundamental story problems. Despite his reputation as a visualist, Burton has never struck me as a poor story-teller before, but it becomes disconcerting how many plot points either aren’t established properly, or don’t achieve sufficient effect. For example, it’ not made clear just how long Charlie’s grandparents have been in bed, which robs Grandpa Joe’s getting up of all its impact. The menace and lure of the factory isn’t as effectively portrayed, either. And we don’t really establish Charlie’s despair when the fifth ticket is found, or his hope when it turns out the final ticket was a fake. Even the moment when he finally finds the ticket isn’t played terribly well. All these moments are much better in the 1971 version, and you start to think that Burton and screenwriter John August were afraid to borrow good ideas from Stuart’s film. Perhaps most crucially, the everlasting gobstopper test has been dropped, and replaced by a flashback-driven subplot involving Wonka’s reconciliation with his dentist father. I didn’t mind the flashbacks per se (I particularly liked a joke about Wonka’s world travel), but the alteration to the story they support confuses the emotional centre of the film. Instead of focussing of Wonka acting as a surrogate father for Charlie, we have Wonka resolving his relationship with his own father, which reduces Charlie to a more peripheral role.
Central to the film, of course, is the casting of Johnny Depp as Wonka. As you’d expect from Depp, it is a terrific and entertaining performance, milking a lot of humour from his strange behaviour and outbursts. Every reviewer is mentioning Michael Jackson, but it’s just unavoidable: however much Depp and Burton might deny the similarity, this at times borders on an impersonation. Depp’s Wonka is more clearly unbalanced, a crazy recluse rather than Wilder’s marvelous oddball. Which is the film’s other crucial flaw: while Depp does his job with his usual professionalism, the approach to the character seems completely misconceived. Once Wonka loses his ambiguity, he loses his fascination, and Depp’s Wonka is so anti-social that he can’t plausibly form any kind of bond with Charlie. Similarly, there is not much sense here of the relationship between Charlie and Grandpa Joe. The result is that Burton’s Charlie feels empty at the middle, despite Freddie Highmore’s natural and appealing performance as Charlie himself.
In the end, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is strikingly similar to the other much-anticipated re-adaptation this year, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like Hitchhiker’s, Burton’s film gets all the design and most of the casting right, only to be let down by a script that makes superfluous additions while fumbling the basics of the original story. It’s a shame Burton’s Charlie and Stuart’s Wonka can’t somehow be combined in some kind of Wonka-esque mixing device: if we had the production design and direction of the new film, with the script of Stuart’s adaptation and Wilder as Wonka, we’d just about have the perfect version.