Wonka: A Miserable Concoction More Bitter Than Sweet

By Chris Knight

Rating: C

The greatest thing about Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie, based on the then-new book by Roald Dahl, was how damned capricious he was.

From the moment he hobbled onto the screen, lost his walking stick and then fell into an acrobat’s tumble, you knew he wasn’t to be trusted. That psychedelic freak-out boat ride he captained likely scarred an entire cohort of impressionable young Baby Boomers.

Now take a look at Timothée Chalamet’s Willy. (Mind out of the chocolate gutter please!) From the moment HE makes landfall in the movie Wonka, arriving on an anonymous ship from an unidentified ocean to an unnamed city that is equal parts Paris, London, Venice and Berlin, he is decent and good and true and philanthropic and sweeter than — I mean, I can’t even think of anything with which to compare him.

Writer Simon Farnaby and writer/director Paul King of Paddington 2 fame, riffing wildly off Dahl this time, have crafted a character so winsome and simple and vapid, he’s as hollow as a cheap chocolate Santa.

The amazing thing is that Chalamet manages to make something out of almost nothing, imbuing his young daydreamer/chocolatier with a wistfulness that gives the illusion of three dimensions. Pure imagination indeed! Crazy to think we’ll see him in Dune next spring, and then as Bob Dylan some time after that. The kid’s got range. Wonka would have melted the career of a lesser thespian.

But behind this questionable character sketch - not to mention those of the three equally evil chocolate magnates who are Willy’s main nemeses - lies the quandary of whether the world even needs this prequel at all. The last decade has given us a plethora of unnecessary backstories - Cruella, Solo, Maleficent, Oz the Great and Powerful, etc. Do we really need to know how Willy became Wonka? Or to learn that much of the transformation was caused by that hoary cinema standby, Missing Mother Syndrome?

But here we are in whatever municipal melange this is. Willy finds himself imprisoned in a laundry for failing to pay his hotel bill to a couple of innkeeper crooks — Tom Davis and Olivia Colman - straight out of a Victor Hugo novel. (Between that and all the musical numbers, I wouldn’t say Wonka is miserable, but it is definitely Les Miserables.) In this workhouse, he comes across a group of similarly incarcerated unfortunates, one of them with the unusual name of Noodle.

She’s played by Calah Lane, not yet 15 and already a strong presence on the screen. She won a Young Entertainer Award a few years ago for the best actress under 10, and has been nominated by the Critics Choice Awards this year for best performance by someone 21 or less. I can’t wait for her to start winning some proper, non-age-based prizes.

Noodle and Willy join forces - each has some wisdom or education the other lacks - to take on the the city’s chocolate oligarchy. The candy barons control both church (Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, accepting sugary indulgences in the Confessional) and state - Keegan-Michael Key as the chief of police, ready to turn a blind eye in order to satiate his sweet tooth. 

Oh, and before you ask, Hugh Grant features in little more than a cameo as a singular Oompa Loompa, exiled from his homeland for falling asleep on the job. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen about all you will of him in the film.

But maybe that’s for the best. After all, this is Wonka’s story, not the Oompas or the Loompas or even Charlie Bucket, whom I presume won’t be born for some years yet in this timeline.

Chalamet does some lovely dancing and croons some good tunes, most of them newly written for this movie by Neil Hannon. But it wouldn’t be a Wonka movie without a rendition of Pure Imagination.

Or maybe it would: Tim Burton left it out of his forgettable retread featuring Johnny Depp.

In any case, this newest concoction gets a lift from its cast but falls to Earth thanks to a leaden script. It’s more exploding chocolate than everlasting gobstopper and, I’m sorry to say, more bitter than sweet.

Wonka. Directed by Paul King. Starring Timothee Chalamet, Calah Lane, and Paterson Joseph. Opens in theatres, Friday, December 15..