Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I really wanted to like this movie. I love Burton's work, enough to pretend "Planet of the Apes" was never made. I love Elfman, despite what it may say about my tastes (but I like Glass too). I love Dahl. But these three great tastes didn't really come together in one candy bar.

The ingredients were great but the mix was flawed. Like homemade ice cream that hasn't set properly. The children were great, every one of them. Perhaps it was that only Mrs. Beauregarde (Missi Pyle) was a strong enough parental character, for the others seemed little more than segueways and background. Charlie's family was really marvelous without being syrupy, though it really bothered me that Freddie Highmore kept reminding me of Tony Blair. Well, he played Charlie Bucket well enough despite that personal set-back for me.

At the risk of being stoned to death by rabid fans armed with jawbreakers, I must say that the fault lay with Depp. Not directly, mind you. His character was wonderfully weird and goofy. But he didn't have much piss in him, just a lot of vinegar. Wonka in the book (and in Gene Wilder's interpretation of him) had enough oomph in him to play off the children, and they in turn could play off him. It was funny to see them regard him with incomprehension, but I think this was more a hollow echo of Goth aesthetic's rejection of suburbia than real interplay. Burton did a better job of that with "Edward Scissorhands". Depp's Wonka was goofy, odd, bizarre, well-played, but misplaced. He was so much in his own world that he hardly presented a strong contrast to the doubters intruding in his private realm. They just kinda squelched against each other rather than bounced like strong characters should.

Maybe this was intended, but the pacing and wit of the film was far short of Burton's usual. Burton's timing has always been tight, but I felt he was just distracted in this movie. It was like someone else had directed and edited the movie and Burton only checked in from time to time. It started out promisingly enough, with a whooshing sweep through of the factory set to classic Elfman ooh-ing and ah-ing, and even brought us up on the story of the Buckets and Willy Wonka rather well. But the rest just kind of dottered along, making an occassional half-hearted stab at Burtonesque baroque (or sometimes unfortunately rather low knee-jerk hey-kids-it's-a-naughtier-Nickelodeon, John-Rhys-Davies-rapes-Tolkien's-language kind of humor that Dahl would have rolled his eyes over).

And what was up with the whole Walter Wonka thing? Burton could have tightened the pacing, pushed Depp to be a little more solidly eccentric, and left out altogether the tearful reunion with dear old Daddy Wonka and the redemption through family. Yeah, we got it the first time that Charlie is a great kid and so are all the Buckets (even grumpy Grandpa George) and you don't have nothing if you don't have family, if you follow the homily. In Dah's hand it was simultaneously sweet and sarcastic, but here it was merely treaclely. Perhaps not deadly to diabetics, but certainly dangerously close to Count Chocula. The bit with Dad, despite the amusing flashbacks, seemed rather tacked on. Almost as if the rather tepid wind-up to Charlie being the last child left standing needed to be propped up, but adding more to the story didn't help. Dahl left it exactly where it needed to be: with Charlie's surprise at his great fortune and Willy Wonka crashing down into the Buckets' lives to elevate them, finally, to a standard of living they deserved for bringing up Charlie so well.

In fact, despite the amusing dental headgear and somewhat inevitable anti-candy-adversity-overcome bit, I would rather that Burton had left Wonka's background story out. He's a magician after all, and that requires mystery. Instead we get a rather drab, unimaginative and unnecessary Hollywood psychological profile.

Visually, it was very amusing and even a little spooky, which was great. But spotty. Too many times I saw artifacts from animation and green screens. And though at first the great factory was truly awesome, it wore on me as being, well, rather predictable. It progressed from being a tour of a TARDIS by an thoroughly eccentric Gallifreyan to an interminable rooundabout inside of V'ger, accompanied by a dully flat alien weirdo. I think entirely too much hung upon the edible room, which worked well for "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", but that was helped along by more than one song.

Most all of Elfman's Oompaloompa songs were departures for him and I actually enjoyed them, except perhaps for the Nut Room (hard to understand) and the TV room (worked well with the video pastiche but was grating). The Oompaloompa's themselves were great when they didn't shimmer with poor matting. I thought the choreography of the cloned actor was entertaining.

2 and a half cups of hot chocolate out of a possible five. Possibly 3 but the milk seemed off.