Factory fun

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(directed by Tim Burton, screenplay by John August, from novel by Roald Dahl; 2005)

Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Roald Dahl, chocolate ... how could Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fall short of heaven? In all but one regard, the adaptation was pretty faithful to the original, and for me, therein lay a problem -- there was very little by way of surprise. The factory interiors lacked zest. I loved one or two of the jokes (which I won't spoil for you), but there were too few such inventions to sustain interest for almost two hours. The songs weren't memorable, and even with the children periodically getting their oh-so-deserved comeuppances, the whole wandering-through-the-factory section felt far too close to, well, wandering through a factory.

The five child actors were uniformly adorably nasty, with the prize perhaps going to newbie Julia Winter as Veruca 'I've only got a pony and a...' Salt. The forty squirrel actors were uniformly creepy. The hundred-and-fifty Oompa Loompal incarnations of Deep Roy were likewise uniformly creepy. Depp's performance, however, was ... a performance: I didn't ever get the sense of him being Willy Wonka. In part, I suspect this is a deliberate attempt to move away from the zany-but-fun Wonka of the earlier film to a darker character originating more in Burton's psyche than Dahl's. This darker, family-phobic Wonka was justified by flashbacks to a chocolate-free childhood -- which worked only in so far as they featured Christopher Lee.

The highlight for me was the early part of the film, before Depp appears, set in the dreary Dickensian cityscape that Burton imagines so well, with a good dollop of narrative drive in the rectangular shape of the five golden tickets.

And the ending? Well, let's just say one can overdose even on Wonka Chocogoodness. For fans of Burton–Depp fairy tales, Edward Scissorhands wins every time.

1 August 2005