Remake fatigue
Mark Steyn
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory PG, selected cinemas
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory came out in 1971, and if you can’t remake a movie after a third of a century, when can you? Mel Stuart’s original is still loved — I was amazed, during last year’s election, at the number of Oompa Loompa gags I received after John Kerry was pictured in an orange jumpsuit and hairnet during a visit to Nasa. But, on the other hand, it’s not so beloved it’s untouchable. So the only question is whether it’s been touched in the right way.
Tim Burton restores Roald Dahl’s origi nal title, casts Johnny Depp in the Gene Wilder role of chocolate-factory owner Willy Wonka, and replaces the Leslie Bricusse/Anthony Newley score with a handful of half-hearted semi-parodic numbers by Danny Elfman. To take the last first, the Bricusse & Newley songs were criticised for not being in the spirit of Dahl. ‘Candy Man’ was a fairly transparent bid for a hit, and it became one, thanks to Sammy Davis Jr:
The Candy Man makes Everything he bakes Satisfying and delicious Talk about your childhood wishes You can even eat the dishes ...
But, while it may not be authentic Dahl, at least it’s something in its own right. Elfman doesn’t seem to do anything except loud orchestral bombast and some clumsily repetitive songs that aren’t quite observant enough to qualify as pastiche. This is a big loss, and one that sums up the differences between the two movies: Willy Wonka ... just gets on with it, unpretentiously; Charlie and ... is more artful and detached, as if its principal aim is not to enchant but to be admired.
As usual with Burton, it looks great, with beautiful details — to single out just one, the retro delivery bikes with which Wonka’s couriers fan out across the town. Burton has created a sorta-English industrial city with Wonka’s gargantuan chocolate factory looming over streets of terraced houses in the midst of which is a dilapidated Dickensian ruin, its splayed gables and walls pointing in all directions simultaneously. Inside live Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore), his mum and dad, plus a quartet of grandparents who sleep and, indeed, live in the same old bed plunked down in the middle of the kitchen. Mum is played by Helena Bonham Carter and spends most of her time cooking cabbage soup.
They are as poor as poor can be. But Charlie dreams of seeing inside the chocolate factory where his grandfather used to work, and when it’s announced that five ‘golden tickets’ for a special tour of Wonka’s have been placed inside the worldwide supplies of Wonkabars, the young lad is determined to be one of the lucky quintet. The first ticket is found by what Charlie’s grandpa calls a ‘porker’, a fat German boy whose face is perpetually smeared with chocolate. The second goes to a spoilt toffee-nosed English girl, whose dad has bought up thousands of Wonkabars for his factory workers to open for her. The third goes to a loud Yank video-game addict, and the fourth to a plastic little mini-Barbie. But the fifth, inevitably, falls Charlie’s way.
This extended opening sequence is the best part of the film. It does a great job building up the mysterious Mr Wonka, and all Johnny Depp has to do is live up to it. But then he appears, a pallid dandy with big teeth and bangs, looking like a Michael Jackofied version of that French actress who played Amelie. ‘Good morning, Starshine,’ he begins. ‘The earth says hello.’ After all the speculation, Depp has decided to play Wonka as a fey enigma, and suddenly the film seems to be getting less funny by the minute. Mel Stuart is nowhere near as celebrated a director as Burton but he understood the satirical elements of the story far better. Something’s wrong when the great Liz Smith, in a cameo as one of Charlie’s grannies, gets more laughs than any of the principals.
Estranged from Dahl’s sense of humour, Tim Burton substitutes his own plot baggage — specifically the notion that Wonka is the way he is because (stop me if you’ve heard this one before, as recently as War of the Worlds) he has ‘issues’ with his dad unresolved from childhood. Oh, dear.
Fortunately, pop Wonka is played by Christopher Lee — or, as one of my kids exclaimed, ‘It’s Count Dooku!’, that being the name of his splendid turn in Star Wars. Lee is having a grand old time at the moment, doing ten minutes in every blockbuster around. My favourite moment in the Lord of the Rings movies isn’t actually in any of the movies, but in one of those ‘the making of’ documentaries that appears on the DVD. It’s the scene where Saruman gets stabbed by Grima Wormtongue, and Lee explains to director Peter Jackson that the backstabbing sound isn’t quite right, because in his days with British Intelligence during the war he used to sneak up and stab a lot of Germans in the back and it was more of a small gasp they made. Jackson backs away cautiously.
Lee’s a marvellous actor, but wasted in a lame five-minute subplot about parental bonding. The faux warmth of his scenes with Depp seems particularly odd in a film whose heart is icy cold and never quite shakes the feeling that everyone’s only doing it because someone else told them it would be a great way to make a pile of money. Remake fatigue is setting in with audiences, and this Charlie takes itself way too seriously.
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