Burton's latest spoils the appetite for chocolate.
When Tim Burton directed 2001's questionable "re-imagining" of
Planet of the Apes
, the pit in the stomach of many leaving the theater asked "why bother?" How quickly we forget-when it was announced Burton would be tackling the screwy world of Willy Wonka, the reaction was "why not?" Both the
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book,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, and the 1971 film starring Gene Wilder are filled with the kind of dark, funny moments Burton thrives on and his twisted visual style is tailor-made for the job.
The familiar tale follows five children-Charlie (Freddie Highmore), Violet (Annasophia Robb), Augustus (Philip Wiegratz), Mike (Jordan Fry) and Veruca (Julia Winter)-as they enter the amazing chocolate factory of Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) courtesy of Golden Tickets hidden in Wonka's candy bars. The opening is charming and magical, capturing the spirit and humor of the book. Highmore is loveable as Charlie and the rest of the kids are over-the-top archetypes of today's children's worst traits; they're violent, spoiled, gluttonous and competitive.
Burton paints the opening in factory gray and snow white, leading up to a
Wizard of Oz
-like transformation into color when the kids enter the factory. Inside, the initially strong pulse flatlines and, for the rest of the movie, Burton grapples with a big budget zombie. The narrative is propelled only by the audience's familiarity with the story as the children succumb to the factory's dangers one by one. The screen is
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bursting with color and strange sights like a chocolate waterfall, but there's no sense of wonder in it-only a banal offset to the jaded and overdone caricatures of modern children.
Depp disappears inside the role of Wonka, his performance easily one of the strangest of his career, but there's a sense that he's acting weird for the sake of being weird rather actually creating a character. The compensation for this lack of depth is a series of flashbacks to Wonka's childhood featuring his dentist father (Christopher Lee), a failed plot addition that does little more than increase the running time. The entire moral thrust of Roald Dahl's book is eventually compromised for the sake of cheap cinematic menace.
It's unfair but inevitable to compare this film to its predecessor. Though Burton's take improves on the original in terms of following the book, it's Wilder who will win the hearts of future generations. Like many confections,
Charlie
is sweet for a while, but in the end it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
