Wonka
Willy Wonka’s origin story is sweet, but slight.
Paul King’s Wonka opens with a blast of colorful optimism: Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in town with a beat-up purple velvet overcoat, twelve sovereigns in his pocket, a suitcase full of chocolate-making tricks, and a head full of dreams. We know the character already, whether from the books, Gene Wilder’s beloved 1971 portrayal, or Johnny Depp’s less-loved take from 2005. The challenge for Wonka (the movie) is to prove its worth as a story on its own merits, just as Wonka (the character) must prove himself as a candy-maker in a town that may be less than hospitable.
Overall, Wonka is a solid movie, especially given that it’s a prequel/musical based on existing IP that audiences weren’t clamoring for. The prequel timing gives the story sufficient distance from the source material that there’s room for the filmmakers to play without getting caught up in some of Roald Dahl’s nastier tendencies. This is a two-edged sword: a necessary and welcome deviation from the racism in Dahl’s original text, and at the same time a celebration of nice-ness that’s good enough to be a pleasant time, but unable to truly stick to the ribs. The movie is fun for the most part, but it isn’t a full-course meal.
The slightness at its core may very well be intentional. In a moviemaking landscape where prequels are written to explain small details in the form of nudge-in-the-ribs plot points, it’s a relief to see a prequel movie that doesn’t feel compelled to present every callback with fanfare. This is the origin story for Willy Wonka’s candy empire, but most of the work is imaginative: Wonka spends most of the movie’s runtime dreaming about what he could build in the future. He’s doing it for the love of the creative work and for the ability to share that act of creation with other people. He’s not in it for the money; he deliberately charges low prices so that everyone in town can enjoy his chocolates. We don’t see the logistics behind the creation of the chocolate factory because we don’t need to. Better to be delighted by the end result, which preserves Wonka’s showman-magician tendencies anyway, and which skips straight ahead to the sweetness of the story.
This sweetness is apparent from the first notes of the film. It opens with a song about Wonka’s dreams that demonstrates where the character has been in the world up to this point and establishes his optimism and generosity despite his lack of funds. We see Wonka distributing what little money he has to people who need it with the same abandon that he’ll use to distribute his chocolate, almost for free, later. This generosity sets him up as a character full of enthusiasm but light on practicality—an ideal protagonist for a children’s movie that encourages its viewers to dream big and, in the dreaming, try to make the world a better place.
It’s a shame, then, that for all its good ingredients the movie doesn’t quite manage to cohere. The original song-and-dance numbers are charming, but they’re a little forgettable, especially when held up against the musical nods to the 1971 film, which are so engrained in our collective cultural consciousness that the movie acknowledges one of them in a piece of dialogue (the “Oompa-Loompa Song”) as a relentless earworm. The plot beats will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen Paul King’s previous outing, Paddington 2; the main character even has a stint in prison, doing laundry as unpaid labor, in each movie. If a movie for children must recycle the gist of another, it might as well be this one: Kindness, generosity, and imagination are far more valuable than wealth and following the dictates of society. It’s not a bad lesson to impart to children, but it is disappointing to see the bones of another movie underneath the skin of this one, especially since Willy Wonka himself spends so much time discussing the value of imagining things that haven’t been made before.
Wonka himself comes across as an eccentric shadow of a preexisting template. Chalamet clearly studied the mannerisms of Gene Wilder’s version of the character, but his rendition of the character never feels particularly devious or dangerous—the one downside to straying from the version of the character in the books. The villains are deliciously cartoonish in a Dahl-ian sort of way, with a laundry-slinging couple named Scrubbitt (Olivia Colman) and Bleecher (Tom Davis) threatening Wonka’s ability to work as a candy-maker, plus a cartel of high-end chocolatiers (Mathew Baynton, Paterson Joseph, and Matt Lucas) who intend to run Wonka out of town for undermining their respective businesses. Rowan Atkinson plays a corrupt priest presiding over “chocoholic monks” to round out the cast of villains. But for all their color and variety, their menace is a little diluted by the fact that there are so many foils for Willy Wonka. They’re all different flavors of possessive greed; they all want money. The point gets repetitive after a while because they all serve the same function. Throw in a subplot about a sweet orphan named Noodle (Calah Lane) and another subplot with an Oompa-Loompa (Hugh Grant), and the story threatens to collapse under its disparate details.
Most disappointing is the way the movie handles the chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key), whom the cartel bribes with chocolate to do their dirty work. Because he keeps increasing his chocolate fee, his waistline expands alongside his attempts to foil Wonka. The movie plays this plot point for slapstick and comedic effect, to the point that the character hardly registers as a villain. It’s disappointing that a movie so focused on the merits of kindness and imagination in everyday life falls into a shorthand that equates one character’s body with an archetype for greed. The misstep is tired and lazy, a storytelling choice that subtracts from the film’s otherwise pervasive point about the inherent goodness and creativity that can come from anybody, anywhere, regardless of their background or circumstances.
Structural disappointments aside, the bright colors blend into one another after a while, and the songs evaporate. Chalamet is a game singer and a perfectly fine dancer, but he hasn’t quite honed his physicality to match that of Gene Wilder’s. That’s fine; this is an origin story. It’s a role Chalamet will likely grow into, especially if Wonka proves successful enough to justify the sequel it sets up. I hope there isn’t one. Wonka doesn’t try to explain everything, and this is a relief, because it’s a distinctly uncynical and earnest take on the character. We don’t need to see how Wonka becomes the misanthrope we meet in the 1971 film. It’s good to be left with a sense of mystery, a nonlinear journey where we are left free to imagine the line between Point A and Point B. I had fun with it. It’s a piece of candy. Let it melt away, instead of following the example of its villains by cashing in.—Sarah Welch-Larson
Wonka is in theaters everywhere.
★★☆☆