Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

let’s have a bit of background. Roald Dahl is easily in my list of the five best children’s authors of all time. Even though I read the novel this movie is based on (and its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator) when I could still count my age on my fingers and have more than one thumb left over, I remember it with a vividness that some books I read even a year ago cannot boast. Dahl is a brilliantly funny writer, and had some absolutely incredible ideas, and the Charlie books were perhaps my favourites, with Matilda.

So even before I went in, I knew that Depp and Burton’s vision of Willy Wonka was very different from mine, which was derived from the book, and the illustrations that went with it. Wonka is an old man who looks rather like Uncle Sam, only with a grin rather than that accusing frown. I was fully prepared for something a bit different from the image I had in my head. My perfect Wonka was not Depp, was certainly not Gene Wilder – I would have chosen exactly who Dahl believed was the only man for the part. But Spike Milligan is dead, and a very un-Burton-like choice.

But before he appeared, we were introduced to Charlie. And Freddie Highmore is perfect: a normal British boy, instantly likeable, totally lacking obvious star quality. Like most of Dahl’s heroes, Charlie is a browbeaten but determined lad, an optimistic victim, someone who has little to celebrate but celebrates nonetheless. Dahl works with simplicity taken to extremes – and who better to deal with simplicity taken to extremes than Burton?

This makes the opening scenes excellent –the lead-up to Charlie getting his golden ticket is very close to the original book, sans only one superfluous bar of chocolate (though keeping one shiny coin seems much more acceptable thank keeping a ten-dollar bill – we must presume they’re dollars, because that’s what Charlie is then offered: we never quite know whether we’re in Britain, where Charlie seems to come from, or America, since they say ‘candy’, ‘vacation’ and ‘dollars’ – not that this matters). Charlie goes to the factory, meets the other children, a delightful group of typical Dahlian grotesques, and Wonka himself makes an appearance.

You can see why reviewers have compared Depp’s Wonka to Michael Jackson – an epicene, socially inept recluse with strange doll-like features and a fantasy land of his very own. But the pariah has long been Burton’s chief concern. A beautiful outcast, tortured by his past yet captivating and successful – all familiar territory. Gone is the Gandalf-like wise patriarch of Dahl’s original, who you trusted enough to know that he was fully in control at all times, and was teaching the wayward children a lesson. Instead there is a vulnerable, secluded, wild character who inspires sympathy rather than awe. It is a very different, very Burton-esque interpretation of the story, but not necessarily a bad one. It is simply a different story, with different sympathies. The child teaches, rather than being taught. It is a good companion to the book, but not a replacement and not a desecration.

And the oompa-loompa songs were damn funny!