The candyman can't
If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl's best-known children's book, 1964's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of the other) - I am not countenancing your decision to do so, but let's say that I have already lost that part of the game - I would like to assume that you would at least try to make a prequel to that book (actually film). This is not something that seems to have been a particularly great concern to director/co-writer Paul King and producer David Heyman, who have instead elected to make a new sequel to 2014's Paddington and 2017's Paddington 2, replacing Michael Bond's gentle-hearted bear with Dahl's terrifying, mecurial chocolatier. And, in the process, making him a great deal less terrifying and mecurial, though I guess he's at least moderately more abrasive than King's interpretation of Paddington. As he would have to be, given that King's Paddington is maybe the least-abrasive character in any English-language film of the 21st Century. And I will concede my biases up front: I wasn't going to get over this. The appeal of Dahl, and by extension Willy Wonka, has always been how appealingly nasty he can be, how so many of his children's books trace down to "you know those extremely cruel people who make your life harder? Let's make them pay." Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a book about a weird elfin man who enjoys torturing naughty children. Deciding to give him a backstory in which he is revealed to be a kindhearted dreamer who just wants the world to be a better place is just awful, and that's irrespective of all the other more fiddly bits King & Simon Farnaby's script doesn't bother trying to get right. None of which inherently makes Wonka a bad movie - I think it is, for other reasons - but does raise the question of what possible value there could be in titling it Wonka beyond the raw, ugly fact of brand recognition and cashing in on an IP Warner Bros, still owns the rights to. And I get it, there isn't any other value, because that's where cinema is in 2023, but it's nice to pretend.
Anyway, if we make a pact with the film to pretend that this is just a nice one-off story - a pretense that becomes extraordinarily hard to maintain once the nostalgia pulls start coming, but that's almost halfway through - it is the story of a charmingly naïve young man named Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet), completing some sort of world tour as he arrives via steamer in a city I would cautiously describe as "Mostly Paris". It has, at any rate, an indoor market called the Galeries Gourmet, home to the world's three greatest chocolate shopes: Slugworth's, Prodnose's, and Fickelgruber's. And soon, Wonka's, if Willy gets to live out his solitary hope for the world, instilled out of a sense of devotion to his dead mother (Sally Hawkins), who lived with Willy in... Amazonia, I guess? The flashback sequence where Willy will later lay out his extremely simple backstory is fanciful enough that you can't really tell, but it appears that she was some kind of cacao plantation worker who smuggled scraps of cacao beans home and, once per year, ground them into delicious homemade chocolate. Years later, Willy plans to use a combination of his culinary skills, his knack at devising Rube Goldbergian inventions, and his training in stage magic, to create the most scrumdidilyumptious confections the world has seen. Unfortunately, Messrs. Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas), and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) have an ironclad cartel on the chocolate industry, and bribe the chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key) to harass Willy every time he makes the slightest effort to sell his wares. Also, Willy is trapped in wage slavery by the villainous landlady Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis), who force desperate people to sign usurious contracts to use her boarding house, and when they can't pay, lock them up in indentured servitude in her laundry service. And Willy, despite being a once-in-a-generation wizard at making chocolate, and having successfully navigated a world tour that apparently started in adolescence, cannot read, and has no concept of people being untrustworthy, so he waltzed right into Scrubbit's trap despite being actively warned against it by the victim of her cruelest contract, poor little orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane). Willy's illiteracy becomes a plot point I think a grand total of twice, so I'm not sure what King & Farnaby thought they were doing with it; just making the protagonist more abject in his harmless innocence, I imagine, since that's pretty much the entirety of the personality they have allotted to this man who will, some years in the future, make a dismissive joke about how he has possibly allowed a child to burn to death in a trash disposal system.
All well and... not "good", actually. I would be inclined to say that there is firmly one plot point too many in the addition of the con artists enslaving people to run their laundry business, and the whole of Wonka is annoyingly busy without actually going anywhere; a third of the way through the film, I still wouldn't have confidently been able to tell you what the actual story was, other than some vague gesture toward "how will Willy outwit the chocolate cartel", and that is much more the background of the movie than its driving force in the first act. To be fair, this is because it's around the halfway point that the film finally introduces a grumpy knee-high orange man with green hair, and Oompa Loompa, named Lofty (Hugh Grant), and its narrative starts to coalesce. To be less fair, the filmmakers did make the choice not to introduce this element until almost halfway through. To be least fair, Lofty ends up doing the movie more harm than good, since Grant is just awful in the part, inexplicably so; maybe it's because he was doing the whole thing separate from the rest of the cast and being composited in, maybe it's because he didn't take to the makeup, maybe Grant was just having a bad few days (and this is just a quintessential "we hired the most expensive actor for precisely this many days of shooting" kind of role), but he is entirely without any sort of likable, charming affect; he seems outright bored, in fact, and by that point in the film, I didn't need someone validating that particular emotion for me.
Anyway, this isn't interesting, but it's harmless: it sort of has to be, that is more or less precisely what it was designed to be: edgeless, harmless frothy comedy for children. And obviously there's nothing wrong with kiddie froth, though I reiterate that of all existing properties to use that approach, it seems monstrously perverse to pick Roald Dahl's best-known character for the honors. But whatever. It's cute-ish and sweet-ish and all that, as far as its story goes. But there's still precious little here that I think actually "works", simply on its own terms as a standalone movie. Most ruinously, I'd say, is the music: Wonka is, like its 1971 precursor, a musical, and like its 1971 precursor, the two best songs are "Pure Imagination" and "Oompa Loompa". The other songs on the packed soundtrack (I think there are 12 distinct numbers, counting reprises) are by Neil Hannon, the founder of the North Irish group Divine Comedy, and they're all some flavor of "lousy". Hannon has not precisely worked in musicals before - he has composed two operas, which both appear to be of the "performed once by the light opera company that commissioned them" variety, and the music but not the lyrics to a children's show that likewise seems to have vanished after its premiere production - and that's pretty obvious in the stiff, talky quality to the lyrics, which go overboard on complicated whimsy and have no real investment in something fussy like "rhythm". He also goes apeshit for slant rhymes, which means that half the songs I found myself constantly getting distracted by trying to confirm I just heard what a character said. Arguably this is better than the sad ballad Willy sings to Noodle, in which the primary motivating force seems to have been finding how many syllables the English language can provide that rhyme with "Noodle". On top of the generally lifeless lyrics, the music is vague and unmemorable; the only one that I could confidently hum even mere hours after the movie was over was "Scrub Scrub", the song where all of Mrs. Scubitt's workers complain about the hard labor she forces them to do, and this is only because the words "scrub scrub" are sung to the same two notes approximately 600 times over the course of the song's two minutes.
And just to make sure this all is as irritating and unendurable as possible, the songs are dominated by Chalamet, who (we are told) got the part after King heard him sing on some YouTube videos, and it's definitely, shall we say, YouTube-quality singing. It's not that Chalamet is bad, exactly. He seems to be reliably able to hit the right notes, without it having to be digitally goosed along. His voice just has no discernible quality. He's got a thin tenor, a kind of weightless reedy tone that is painless to listen to but makes absolutely no impression. And we hear it a lot. So, in short, that's a big red X across all the music.
Visually, the film has the approximate storybook quality of the Paddingtons, but with less of a focused sense of tone or world-building; production design Nathan Crowley (who was, until this, Christopher Nolan's guy) has created something with a lot of baroque filigree, dominated by pink and gold tones, with a little bit of green around the edges, and this palette has been only slightly expanded by costume designer Lindy Hemming, so the whole thing feels kind of, my apologies, but kind of "barfy". And maybe that wouldn't be completely impossible if cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon (who was, some time ago, Park Chan-wook's guy, and I'm at a complete loss to explain how he could have fallen this far) hadn't learned into the color scheme so much, emphasising the pinks to the point that Wonka seems overall to be a bit feverish and sweaty. It's unexpectedly ugly, in fact, something I would have thought that Heyman would have been too good at his job to permit; say what you will about the routinely garish Harry Potter films, but they always looked like lavish movie productions, and this feels somehow chintzy in its stagebound aesthetic. Not that Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory had an all-time rich production - it came from an era when children's movie all look a bit threadbare - but there's something cozy about it. Wonka is never cozy. It's just kind of tacky and flat, a disappointing misfire from mostly the same production team that made such a warm blanket out of Paddington 2, and irritatingly free of the "pure imagination" that it presumes to be its most sacred value.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Anyway, if we make a pact with the film to pretend that this is just a nice one-off story - a pretense that becomes extraordinarily hard to maintain once the nostalgia pulls start coming, but that's almost halfway through - it is the story of a charmingly naïve young man named Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet), completing some sort of world tour as he arrives via steamer in a city I would cautiously describe as "Mostly Paris". It has, at any rate, an indoor market called the Galeries Gourmet, home to the world's three greatest chocolate shopes: Slugworth's, Prodnose's, and Fickelgruber's. And soon, Wonka's, if Willy gets to live out his solitary hope for the world, instilled out of a sense of devotion to his dead mother (Sally Hawkins), who lived with Willy in... Amazonia, I guess? The flashback sequence where Willy will later lay out his extremely simple backstory is fanciful enough that you can't really tell, but it appears that she was some kind of cacao plantation worker who smuggled scraps of cacao beans home and, once per year, ground them into delicious homemade chocolate. Years later, Willy plans to use a combination of his culinary skills, his knack at devising Rube Goldbergian inventions, and his training in stage magic, to create the most scrumdidilyumptious confections the world has seen. Unfortunately, Messrs. Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas), and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) have an ironclad cartel on the chocolate industry, and bribe the chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key) to harass Willy every time he makes the slightest effort to sell his wares. Also, Willy is trapped in wage slavery by the villainous landlady Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis), who force desperate people to sign usurious contracts to use her boarding house, and when they can't pay, lock them up in indentured servitude in her laundry service. And Willy, despite being a once-in-a-generation wizard at making chocolate, and having successfully navigated a world tour that apparently started in adolescence, cannot read, and has no concept of people being untrustworthy, so he waltzed right into Scrubbit's trap despite being actively warned against it by the victim of her cruelest contract, poor little orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane). Willy's illiteracy becomes a plot point I think a grand total of twice, so I'm not sure what King & Farnaby thought they were doing with it; just making the protagonist more abject in his harmless innocence, I imagine, since that's pretty much the entirety of the personality they have allotted to this man who will, some years in the future, make a dismissive joke about how he has possibly allowed a child to burn to death in a trash disposal system.
All well and... not "good", actually. I would be inclined to say that there is firmly one plot point too many in the addition of the con artists enslaving people to run their laundry business, and the whole of Wonka is annoyingly busy without actually going anywhere; a third of the way through the film, I still wouldn't have confidently been able to tell you what the actual story was, other than some vague gesture toward "how will Willy outwit the chocolate cartel", and that is much more the background of the movie than its driving force in the first act. To be fair, this is because it's around the halfway point that the film finally introduces a grumpy knee-high orange man with green hair, and Oompa Loompa, named Lofty (Hugh Grant), and its narrative starts to coalesce. To be less fair, the filmmakers did make the choice not to introduce this element until almost halfway through. To be least fair, Lofty ends up doing the movie more harm than good, since Grant is just awful in the part, inexplicably so; maybe it's because he was doing the whole thing separate from the rest of the cast and being composited in, maybe it's because he didn't take to the makeup, maybe Grant was just having a bad few days (and this is just a quintessential "we hired the most expensive actor for precisely this many days of shooting" kind of role), but he is entirely without any sort of likable, charming affect; he seems outright bored, in fact, and by that point in the film, I didn't need someone validating that particular emotion for me.
Anyway, this isn't interesting, but it's harmless: it sort of has to be, that is more or less precisely what it was designed to be: edgeless, harmless frothy comedy for children. And obviously there's nothing wrong with kiddie froth, though I reiterate that of all existing properties to use that approach, it seems monstrously perverse to pick Roald Dahl's best-known character for the honors. But whatever. It's cute-ish and sweet-ish and all that, as far as its story goes. But there's still precious little here that I think actually "works", simply on its own terms as a standalone movie. Most ruinously, I'd say, is the music: Wonka is, like its 1971 precursor, a musical, and like its 1971 precursor, the two best songs are "Pure Imagination" and "Oompa Loompa". The other songs on the packed soundtrack (I think there are 12 distinct numbers, counting reprises) are by Neil Hannon, the founder of the North Irish group Divine Comedy, and they're all some flavor of "lousy". Hannon has not precisely worked in musicals before - he has composed two operas, which both appear to be of the "performed once by the light opera company that commissioned them" variety, and the music but not the lyrics to a children's show that likewise seems to have vanished after its premiere production - and that's pretty obvious in the stiff, talky quality to the lyrics, which go overboard on complicated whimsy and have no real investment in something fussy like "rhythm". He also goes apeshit for slant rhymes, which means that half the songs I found myself constantly getting distracted by trying to confirm I just heard what a character said. Arguably this is better than the sad ballad Willy sings to Noodle, in which the primary motivating force seems to have been finding how many syllables the English language can provide that rhyme with "Noodle". On top of the generally lifeless lyrics, the music is vague and unmemorable; the only one that I could confidently hum even mere hours after the movie was over was "Scrub Scrub", the song where all of Mrs. Scubitt's workers complain about the hard labor she forces them to do, and this is only because the words "scrub scrub" are sung to the same two notes approximately 600 times over the course of the song's two minutes.
And just to make sure this all is as irritating and unendurable as possible, the songs are dominated by Chalamet, who (we are told) got the part after King heard him sing on some YouTube videos, and it's definitely, shall we say, YouTube-quality singing. It's not that Chalamet is bad, exactly. He seems to be reliably able to hit the right notes, without it having to be digitally goosed along. His voice just has no discernible quality. He's got a thin tenor, a kind of weightless reedy tone that is painless to listen to but makes absolutely no impression. And we hear it a lot. So, in short, that's a big red X across all the music.
Visually, the film has the approximate storybook quality of the Paddingtons, but with less of a focused sense of tone or world-building; production design Nathan Crowley (who was, until this, Christopher Nolan's guy) has created something with a lot of baroque filigree, dominated by pink and gold tones, with a little bit of green around the edges, and this palette has been only slightly expanded by costume designer Lindy Hemming, so the whole thing feels kind of, my apologies, but kind of "barfy". And maybe that wouldn't be completely impossible if cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon (who was, some time ago, Park Chan-wook's guy, and I'm at a complete loss to explain how he could have fallen this far) hadn't learned into the color scheme so much, emphasising the pinks to the point that Wonka seems overall to be a bit feverish and sweaty. It's unexpectedly ugly, in fact, something I would have thought that Heyman would have been too good at his job to permit; say what you will about the routinely garish Harry Potter films, but they always looked like lavish movie productions, and this feels somehow chintzy in its stagebound aesthetic. Not that Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory had an all-time rich production - it came from an era when children's movie all look a bit threadbare - but there's something cozy about it. Wonka is never cozy. It's just kind of tacky and flat, a disappointing misfire from mostly the same production team that made such a warm blanket out of Paddington 2, and irritatingly free of the "pure imagination" that it presumes to be its most sacred value.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
