Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

December 18, 2008

Television Broadcast, Seattle, WA

* ½ / ****

By Scott Muoio

After stinking up the joint with a silly, misguided, and overblown 2001 Planet of the Apes remake, Tim Burton returns to re-imagine land with a new version of the 1971 classic, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Once again, Burton’s remake confirms one particular thing: other than his original Batman, Burton’s “re-imaginings” are uniformly awful.

While Charlie’s plot is relatively the same as its predecessor, (a poor boy named Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) wins one of five golden tickets allowing him a day’s access to reclusive candy magnate, Willy Wonka’s bizarre chocolate factory), it’s execution is light years away from the 1971 version’s creepy charm and magical weirdness. Using his signature Gothic look and feel, and shoehorning his regular cast into the roles while providing additional back-story to spruce up the plot, Burton turns Charlie’s story into Tim’s story. In other words, Burton takes the already established colorful, crazy, and organic Willy Wonka aesthetic and drabs it down with murky sets and ugly/gawdy computer generated effects. Like letting The Cure teenage fanclub loose in a candy store, someone’s bound to get sick all over the place. In this case, it’s our stomachs that are left churning.

Like many of his other films, the characters in Charlie feel flat, boring, and have none of the pizzazz their outrageous names and personalities warrant. Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, the Oompa-loompas… these are classic screen characters that Burton somehow turns into drab shells of their former selves. Even with the back-story flourishes, a great idea in theory, the execution leaves you feeling like you know little if anything about any of them. With so much potential script-wise and a talented cast along for the ride it’s a shame the Wonkatania’s rudder veered the ship down such a perilously typical and joyless path.

Despite the bad, Charlie is not without a few good moments. The best come when it clarifies some of the absurd leaps of logic created by the original novel, oddities that bogged down the first film with silly inconsistencies. Here, the original movie’s strange ending is tweaked, its Grandpa made more reasonable, its factory made more wondrously expansive (a huge budget will do that), and many of its minor players feel more convincing as characters than their predecessors even if they are less memorable (a much better cast is the difference this go ‘round). Unfortunately, even with the additional money and talent this version’s factory is more reminiscent of a poorly illustrated video game than a goofy wonderland and its series of sketches more laborious than kooky. Where the first film was an odd, late ‘60s/early ‘70s acid trip for the General Audience crowd the new version is a bland, Goth, Wizard of Oz wannabe. I loved the opening mannequin song before the children enter the factory, but outside of that isolated moment of creepy genius there was nothing that captured my anxious imagination.

And then there’s Johnny Depp, picking up for Gene Wilder as the grand wizard of candyland, himself, Willy Wonka. I have been a fan of Depp for decades so suffice it to say his muttering, plasticine performance as Wonka is not one of his best.

No majesty, no interesting mystery, and little to enchant us, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is what happens when Tim Burton makes his kind of movie out of a script that just shouldn’t go that way.

Director: Tim Burton

Producer: Brad Grey, Richard Zanuck

Writer: John August, Roald Dahl (book)

Starring: Freddie Highmore, Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Holder, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter

Original Music: Danny Elfman

Cinematographer: Philippe Rousselot

Editor: Chris Lebenzon