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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory July 17, 2005 |
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Tim Burton’s new film, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is likely to be the strangest family musical comedy you see this year, and I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. To start, let’s weigh the pros of this most recent adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s classic. With most Burton, the best argument towards a positive reading of the work is its complete imagination, plunging the audience into a weird ménage of colors, sounds, singing little people, fabulous sets, goofball humor, singing puppets, pink sheep, childlike glee, and whimsical anarchy. It is a sensory overload, and for those already high on chocolate, or just the image of a never-ending chocolate waterfall, it’s visual stimulation at its harmless best. That the film is a singular piece of pastel brightened filmmaking is all the more special in this age of less-than-original remakes, and the original film, 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” was in itself a rather whacked-out and dark spin on the “Alice in Wonderland” theme. There are more pros, and we’ll cover those properly later, but the major con of Burton’s film, and it may be bigger than that wonderful imagination (indeed, it’s part of it), is that it’s all so uneven, or, more specifically, it has that classic remake air about it, a stale air, that suggests a filmmaker doing what he wants for the sake of doing it, and that’s hardly ever good. The product is often labored, with a series of increasingly bizarre musical set pieces that all end in an awkward one-liner from our tour guide, Willy Wonka, that falls dead with uncomfortable moments of silence where the laughs should be, but usually aren’t. It’s not like the movie misses all of its jokes, some of the lines by Wonka, played to an oddly improvisational hilt by the prolific Johnny Depp, ring true, but it’s those strange musical numbers, choreographed like a Busby Berkley song-and-dance on Ritalin, featuring many, many synchronized Oompa Loompa’s, that never quite jell as good satire, music, or comedy. There are five such numbers, and it’s hard to look past them. For anybody who hasn’t read the famous book, or seen the even more famous Gene Wilder original adaptation, the story involves a special one-day tour of a magical chocolate factory, run by the reclusive Peter Pan meets Michael Jackson meets Nelson Muntz prankster Willy Wonka. For years, Wonka has been holed up in his fortress, with little outside knowledge of who, or what is running the place, but a recent promotion, placing five rare golden tickets inside five winning candy bars, gives five lucky kids the opportunity to take a tour of the factory. Charlie Bucket (Depp’s “Finding Neverland” costar Freddie Highmore) is a dirt poor, but impressionable London boy who wins the fifth slot, along with kids ranging in degrees of obnoxiousness: the gluttonous Augustus Gloop, the egotistical Violet Beauregarde, the spoiled brat Veruca Salt, and the troublemaker Mike Teavee, who all fall victim, one way or another, to Wonka’s cruel and unusual factory spells. Veruca, for example, is beat up by a pack of trained squirrels, Augustus is sucked up into a chocolate transporting tube, and Violet is fed a piece of gum that turns her into a blueberry. The pranks are all set up well, but never register much of an emotion from the child’s parent, and the capping Oompa Loompa song-and-dance numbers, all performed by one man, Deep Roy, in an impressive, highly expressive performance, are just a little too much icing on an already double-iced cake. “I must say,” says James Fox of the first number, “that all seemed rather rehearsed.” True, and somewhat pointless, if visually sumptuous. Aside from the diverting nuisance of those stagy set pieces, and the hit-or-miss humor, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is a fun little summer movie, never offensive, certainly never boring, and maybe painfully too simple; a dark children’s tale that will only challenge a child’s ability to reason Wonka’s motives and his bizarre mannerisms, which, as it turns out, come from a neglectful childhood with a father (Christopher Lee) who wouldn’t allow him chocolate growing up. That back story is actually a nice added bonus to the original story- Burton capturing a theme of father-son abandonment found most importantly in “Edward Scissorhands”, in the Vincent Price flashback death scene- and gives the film an emotional core that is, while somewhat cloying, a needed softener to the antics of the factory. Depp is becoming the number one actor in Hollywood today in creating off-the-wall, totally original screwball characters, and his Wonka is no exception, a schizophrenic kook so in love with his chocolate, wonderful toys, and precious Oompa Loompa’s that he misses most of the finer points in life, that is until young Charlie comes along to teach him. Depp has a way of tossing off inconsequential lines that makes them funnier than they actually are (“Whipped cream isn’t whipped cream if it hasn’t been whipped with whips, everybody knows that.”), and I think that’s the fun in the film, that even though it makes little sense, and is sometimes too bizarre, even by Tim Burton’s lofty standards of wackiness, it’s always good for a harmless smile. During a summer of unoriginality and lame remakes, that’s a most important aspect indeed. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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