Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Release Date: July 15, 2005 Starring: Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly Directed by: Tim Burton
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/15/05)
Aesthetically wild and otherwise mild, director Tim Burton's crazy-expensive new vision of the late author Roald Dahl's perennial 1964 candyland fantasy is a demented dazzler, if only a teasing fraction of potentiality for those who recognize the sublime genius of Burton's old-school ouevre (Edward Scissorhands, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, etc.). Scripted by John August (Big Fish) to be more faithful to the book than to 1971's psychedelic family classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, this contemporized kiddie morality tale begins with a bubble-gum bang, but leaves viewers gobstopped in the detached, thinly plotted half-pleasures of watching CGI mechanisms implode in a rainbow of fruit flavors.
Set in a dismally expressionist London that would fit smashingly across the pond from Burton's Gotham City, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory pretends to be the story of young Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore of Finding Neverland), a self-righteous smiler in a Caligari-skewed poorhouse of two struggling parents and four bedridden grandparents. Enter the true star, Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp, rebuffing Gene Wilder's calculating puck-whiz to play Wonka as an emotionally fractured man-child with Anna Wintour's coiffure), an eccentric confectioner who has broken his hermetic 15-year silence and agreed to re-open his labyrinthine factory for the sake of a contest. Any kid-at-heart knows this one: Five golden tickets are to be wrapped in five random chocolate bars around the world, thus five lucky children (and a guardian each) will meet their fates along an incredible, edible tour with madman Wonka as their guide. The four rotten apples to Charlie's good egg are a hoot, especially AnnaSophia Robb as rich mini-bitch Violet Beauregarde and Julia Winter as wide-eyed Stepford daughter Veruca Salt, and the mesmerzing, Busby Berkeley-ish musical numbers by the dwarven workforce of Oompa Loompas (all digital clones of the amazing Deep Roy, tunes by a self-cribbing Danny Elfman) can easily be called the film's most perfect reinvention.
So if Chocolate Factory puts the candy in eye-candy, why the disappointing aftertaste? Could it be the psychology-lite backstory of Wonka's daddy issues, complete with awkwardly placed flashback to Christopher Lee as a stern dentist denying his orthodontured son a Halloween "cavity on a stick?" Perhaps the lack of Grimm danger is what triggers the tameness, since the burp-for-your-life suspense from '71 is gone, as are both the sadly excised drama of the secret-stealing spy Slugsworth and the test that Charlie must pass after the other children have fallen victim to their vices (here, he wins the factory simply because he's the last survivor). Or maybe it's just about timing. Safely seated in a pew of today's puritanical praises, the movie revises its source material to hold family values in higher regard than the scrumpdiddleumptiously soulful entertainment it could have been. —Aaron Hillis
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.