I went and saw Charlie and the The Chocolate Factory tonight. I don’t remember much of the book or Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory other than the songs and the grotesque ways in which the bad children are dispatched.
At this point, these movies are like a finely tuned machine for Burton and his buddies Danny Elfman, who has composed music for 12 of Burton’s films, and Johnny Depp, who has starred in five of them.
A lot’s been made of Depp’s performance and appearance resembling that of Michael Jackson. Appearance, maybe. He’s got the black pageboy haircut, lipstick, powdery white face and a penchant for frocks and canes. But in his performance, Depp reminded me more of the benevolent creepiness of Mr. Rogers, only with mildly hostile sarcasm and bigger teeth.
For me, the best parts of the movie occur before Depp even gets any face time. Burton’s most impressive achievement is the staggering way in which he creates his own world in painstaking detail, an exaggerated reality equal parts cartoon and gothic, like that of Edward Scissorhands. It seems clear that with movies like these to his credit, Burton would be the favorite filmmaker of Hans Christian Andersen.
As the movie opens, the fairytale world in which Charlie lives unflolds as a 1940s-era London town with the mysterious, gated Wonka factory at its edge. The Bucket family lives in a wind-slanted shack in the middle of a scrubby lot, Charlie’s four grandparents sharing a bed and Charlie sleeping in a loft above where he can look through holes in the dilapidated ceiling.
The sequences that reveal the lives of Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt and Mike Teavee, each of whom win a Golden Ticket to tour Wonka’s factory, are fabulous cutaway sequences rich in detail and caricature.
Strangely, the sequences inside the factory itself failed to instill me with childlike awe or even interest. I found myself waiting for each of the kids to get knocked off, accompanied by an obligatorily mind-melting song-and-dance routine by the Oompa-Loompas (played by one actor and multiplied digitally to strangely appropriate effect). I particularly enjoyed the way in which Veruca was tossed down a garbage chute in a seamlessly eerie combination of live action and computer effects. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that she’s dispatched the same way she is in the book, not the way she is in the 1971 movie. If I were a young kid, I’d be freaked out by this stuff, even though the audience is shown at the end of the film that each of the kids turns out O.K., if not slightly worse for the wear.