[COLUMN] Wonka Flattens Its Willy | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Wonka.

This may sound like it is damning with faint praise, but Wonka is much better than “a Willy Wonka prequel” has any right to be.

A lot of this is down to director Paul King, who co-wrote the script with his Paddington collaborator Simon Farnaby. King infuses the movie with a dynamism and an energy that carries it along. It is a film with clear emotional and character arcs, with a strong grasp of structure and with an obvious enthusiasm for the old-fashioned musical. Coming up to Christmas, particularly after Wish faltered with critics and audiences, Wonka offers good old-fashioned family fun in time for the festive season.

As one might expect from a prequel to a book that has been adapted into two very successful films, Wonka leans hard on nostalgia. When Lofty the Oompa Loompa (Hugh Grant) shows up, he dutifully riffs on the classic “Oompa Loompa” song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Composers Joby Talbot and Neil Hannon weave “Pure Imagination” into the film’s soundscape. It spoils little to reveal that the movie ends with Willy (Timothée Chalamet) establishing his chocolate factory.

There is something inherently comforting in all of that nostalgia, in those references and allusions to a beloved children’s classic. To the credit of King and Farnaby, this desire to reconnect with the innocent wonder of childhood is woven into the text of the film. Willy arrives in town to make and sell chocolate, but his character motivation is firmly rooted in an attempt to reconnect to the happy childhood that he spent with his mother (Sally Hawkins).

This backstory is perhaps a little overwrought and heavy-handed, effectively the flipside of the origin story that Tim Burton offered in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which framed Willy’s (Johnny Depp) choice of career as an act of rebellion against his dentist father (Christopher Lee). Chalamet’s version of Willy remembers the chocolate that his mother would make for him on his birthday. He believes that, if he can succeed as a chocolatier, he might commune with her again.

This is an effective emotional hook. Willy Wonka is an eccentric and unusual character, so giving him such a straightforward motivation makes it easier for the audience to root for him. After all, while Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp were the stars of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they were never the protagonists of the story. Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum, Freddie Highmore) was the focal character, with Willy Wonka serving as a trickster foil.

In Wonka, Willy is still weird. Chalamet has a certain off-kilter energy that distinguishes him from his contemporaries, more conventional young leading men like Tom Holland or Jacob Elordi. It’s telling that Chalamet’s big franchise play wasn’t a superhero franchise like Spider-Man, although he was reportedly on the shortlist, it was something as bizarre and unusual as Dune. Chalamet brings that unconventional style to Willy. He’s alternatingly intense and fanciful, introspective and flamboyant.

However, there are limits. Ultimately, Wonka presents the eponymous weirdo as a conventional hero. The movie’s morality is clear cut. Willy is introduced not even fresh off the boat, singing optimistically about his ambitions and dreams as he arrives in port. The canny locals quickly spot a mark, and Willy is promptly separated from his money. Even then, the film goes out of its way to underscore that Willy is fundamentally decent. He gives his second-to-last coin to a poor beggar on the street.

Wonka depicts a world populated by clear-cut heroes and villains, setting Willy against the predatory hostel owner Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), the corrupt Chief-of-Police (Keegan-Michael Key), and the sinister Chocolate Cartel headed by Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph). Tricked into indentured servitude by Scrubbit, Willy befriends a young, abandoned girl named Noodle (Calah Lane) and a colorful collection of other laborers. He concocts a plan to free them all and start his business.

Wonka positions Willy as a wholesome figure. He clearly cares about Noodle and the other victims of Scrubbit’s schemes. His partnership with Noodles is more than mere expedience. He promises her a lifetime’s supply of chocolate and begins delivering immediately. At the turn of the third act, Slugworth is able to leverage Willy into submission by forcing the young business to abandon his dreams of opening a story in return for Slugworth buying out Scrubbit’s contracts on her laborers.

This is a large part of why the movie works as well as it does. Wonka never asks its audience to feel uneasy or uncomfortable about the eponymous character. His actions might be unpredictable, but his motivations are always pure. Willy is a selfless and sincere hero, who is just eccentric enough to be compelling but never strange enough to appear threatening. Befitting his grand ambitions as a chocolatier, this version of Willy is sweet to the core.

However, this approach also feels like something of a betrayal of the source material, pushing the beloved and iconic character towards something much more generic and conventional. Like most of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s stories, there is a darkness nestled at the heart of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Critic Ann-Marie Cahill argues, not unreasonably, that the book is a horror story in which Charlie is “the final girl.”

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka is an eccentric and lonely tycoon. Unmarried and childless, he claims to be “much older” than he seems. He invites a bunch of children into his factory, subjecting them to a variety of temptations and tortures. The children all survive the experience, but Wonka is somewhat indifferent to their safety. When Veruca Salt gets whisked down a chute to the furnace, Wonka muses, “There’s always a chance they decided not to light it today.”

As with so many of Dahl’s books, there's something dark nestled at the heart of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The original draft of the story imagined Charlie as a Black child covered in chocolate and delivered to Wonka’s son. The published version of the story includes a sly dick joke. It is no wonder that popular internet memes posit that Willy Wonka is a serial killer. There is something unpleasant bubbling beneath this fantastical story.

That carries to the film adaptations. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a frequently unsettling watch, to the point that even the young actors on set felt uncomfortable. Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt in the movie, acknowledges that shooting the memorable tunnel sequence was “scary.” Gene Wilder is an incredibly charming comedic performer, but his portrayal of Wonka vacillates between menacing and maniacal to great effect.

Wilder famously insisted that he be introduced in the film as a doddering old man with a cane, only to suddenly reveal his true appearance with a dynamic summersault. When director Mel Stuart asked why he wanted to be introduced in that way, Wilder explained, “[B]ecause no one will know from that point on whether I am lying or telling the truth.” Widler tapped into that untrustworthiness and that unknowability that defined Willy Wonka.

Johnny Depp adopted a similar approach. Much of the discussion around Depp’s performance as Willy Wonka focused on comparisons to Michael Jackson, which had decidedly sinister undercurrents even then. For what it’s worth, despite expressing a desire to play the pop star on screen, Depp has consistently denied modelling his performance on Jackson, instead arguing that he “imagined what George Bush would be like incredibly stoned.”

Depp acknowledged the unsettling effect of Wilder’s take on the character. “It was brilliant but subtle,” Depp told The Los Angeles Times. “So that scares the crap out of you.” Depp’s take was similarly uncomfortable. He wore veneers that “changed the shape of [his] face a little bit”, although Burton reportedly talked him down from a prosthetic nose. Interviews with younger audience members tended to settle on the word “freaky” to describe the performance.

There is something undeniably dangerous about these earlier takes on Willy Wonka, evoking fairytale figures like the Pied Piper of Hamelin or Rumpelstiltskin. That danger is entirely missing from Chalamet’s take on the character in Wonka. Chalamet has some of the eccentricity that defined Wilder and Depp’s versions of the entrepreneur, but none of the edge. He’s much more conventional. He’s much flatter. Wonka cares a great deal more about Noodles than he does about any of the children he invites to tour his factory.

Of course, Wonka is a prequel and an origin. There is perhaps an interesting story to be told about how Chalamet’s kind-hearted bohemian became a creepy recluse like the versions played by Wilder or Depp. After all, Wonka is about a man trying to build a financial empire, forced to confront a villainous cabal plotting against him. What compromises might he have to make to succeed? What kind of man might he need to become in order to win?

Paul King has jokingly described Wonka as “a savage indictment of contemporary capitalism”, but it feels like it could go a lot further. It’s possible to imagine an alternate version of Wonka that gives its lead an arc closer to that of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a well-intentioned man who is down on his luck and so desperate to succeed that anything becomes acceptable. Wonka lacks that edge.

There is a lot to enjoy in Wonka. It is a well-made movie with a game cast and an infectious joy. At the same time, it feels like it misses the appeal of its central character. Throughout Wonka, the protagonist throws together exotic ingredients. The chocolate exteriors of Willy’s confections often encase a richer filling, balancing competing flavors, mixing the sweet with the sour. Biting into Wonka, the blend seems wrong. There’s no filling, only sweetness.