Reviewed by Tim Robins
Willy Wonka is a character created by Roald Dahl Britain’s most beloved sexist, racist, anti-semite. Try not to let that – or the two hit and miss film adaptations of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory – put you off seeing Wonka, a delightful, wholly enjoyable musical starring the ebullient and brilliant Timothée Chalamet.
So I’ll say up front that I haven’t had such a pleasant time watching a film for quite some time. Despite critics complaints about the film’s somewhat frothy material, Wonka is an ideal Christmas movie. It has a witty script, co-written by Simon Farnaby and The Mighty Boosh’s Paul King, who also directs this new feature, the clever chap who brought you Paddington (2014) and its 2017 sequel. The result is a nostalgic film that will remind you of such 1960s musicals as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Oliver! (1968) and Mary Poppins (1964).
The audience that I watched Wonka with were entirely older folk like myself, and we enjoyed it immensely. A particular laugh was raised by the explanation for the film’s PG rating for “implied bad language”. More than a few of us wondered how one could imply bad language and spent the film trying to spot it. We failed.
Wonka is not the story of Wonka as a boy, as some seem to believe, but rather the story of how he came to establish his chocolate business. Of course the book, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, already contains the story of how Wonka – part magician, part chocolate maker – came to set up his factory and the circumstances by which it became populated with a workforce of knee-high Oompa Loompas from Loompaland, somewhere in Africa.
The book’s backstory could be read as a satirical take on the paternalistic pretensions of British Colonialism or an entirely benign take on the post-war influx of immigrants from the West Indies to Britain. Unfortunately, it isn’t either of those things and is the first hurdle the film Wonka has to jump.
The film goes with the newer convention of representing the Oompa Loompas as orange faced, green haired little people. I must admit I thought Tim Burton’s adaptation nailed it by casting Deep Roy in all the Loompa roles, but it wasn’t the characters’ skin-colour that was the only problem.
Nothing says oppressed, disparaged Africans, as the Oompa-Loompas originally were, than the name Oompa-Loompa itself. And nothing says “primitive people failing to meet the valued norms of western culture” like portraying them as happy-go-lucky folk willing to down tools for the sake of a song and dance number. You can paint the Oompa-Loompas’ faces, orange but they still read as Black and still carry awkward associations between Black skin colour and chocolate.
The new Wonka movie tries, and for the most part succeeds, in diverting the book’s troubling racism by casting the talented Calah Lane in an up front and central role as a “Noodle” – an orphaned child enslaved, as Willy Wonka will soon be, to the venal Mrs Scrubbit. Lane provides much of the film’s heart and forms a bond with Wonka, offering to teach him to read (a hitherto unsuspected failing on the part of the magician, engineer and chocolatier).
“Noodle” owes nothing to Dahl but a whole lot to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The film creates a comically grotesque world filled with venal adults out to fleece anyone who comes across their path. Wonka arrives in an unidentified town having travelled the world gathering rare sources of chocolate with apparently magical powers. Unfortunately, the exuberant entrepreneur runs right in the arms of the thoroughly horrible captains of the chocolate industry: Slugworth, Prodnose, and Fickelgruber, all mentioned in the book. (Hmmm… “Prodnose”? “Fickelgruber” Quickly, moving on…)…
Of course, “Noodle” functions as a happy distraction from the unpleasant connotations of Oompa-Loompers – don’t look there! Look over here! But the “whitewashing” is aided by Hugh Grant, who is chasing Wonka around the world to pay back a personal chocolate debt to the Loompa nation incurred by letting Wonka steal the Loompas’ precious cocoa beans. Grant’s performance is wonderful. The actor appears as an over-large head on an over-small body.
The script takes the book’s “just world fallacy” – that good people are rewarded and bad people get what’s coming for them – and turns Dahl’s malevolent eye towards the adult world in a joust with corrupt capitalists, their religious apologists and class traitors. The casting alone is pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to your face and includes Rowan Atkinson as a priest, Matt Lucas as Prodnose and Olivia Coleman as Mrs Scrubbit. Paterson Joseph also gleefully chews up the scenery as villain in chief Slugworth.
As a counterpoint to the gang of corporate ne’er-do-wells and their lickspittles, Willy Wonka, tricked into servitude in Mrs Scrubbit’s Laundrette, gathers a virtuous circle of friends from among a similarly imprisoned group of industrious gentle folk.
Despite the larger than life ensemble cast, and multiple plotlines, Timothée Chalamet rises above the crowd. He leaps from the screen in an all- dancing, all-singing and sometimes heartfelt performance, that was as delightful as it was surprising. It is hard to reconcile his on-screen performance with other screen Wonkas we have seen. Then again, who wants a repeat of Johnny Depp’s creepy interpretation? And yes, Gene Wilder won many people over with his proto-Tom Baker/Fourth Doctor take on the character, but he was not the Willy Wonka of Dahl’s book. Dahl hated the performance and, much more importantly, so did my best friend who adored the book, saw the fist film adaptation when first released, and was pained by its departure from the original text. You really don’t want to see a critical, pained look on a ten-year-old’s face.
If Wonka were a box of chocolates it would be a selection of Cadbury’s Milk Tray – not exactly adventurous, but with a comforting sweet taste and a judicious mix of soft and hard centres. Tuck in, Wonka is simply yummy.
Tim Robins
• Wonka is in all good cinemas across the UK now
Official Website: wonkamovie.com
• Wonka – The Music – streaming here on AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
• Fancy winning a “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Collector’s Edition Replica Golden Ticket” from We Are Fanattik? Simply follow @TheArtsShelf on X, repost and tag a friend to enter. Competition closes at 23:59 on Sunday 17th December 2023 – 18+ | UK ONLY (Details here)
• USA Today: Willy Wonka-inspired hotel rooms in New York, Los Angeles to open for bookings
• Wonka adapted by Sibéal Pounder
Before Charlie, before the Chocolate Factory, comes a story of invention and imagination . . .
Ever since he was a child, Willy Wonka had dreamed of making chocolate and sharing it with the world. As a young man, he arrives at the world-famous Galeries Gourmet, determined to change the world one delectable bite at a time.
But hounded by a trio of jealous chocolatiers, and tricked into a lifetime of washhouse drudgery, Wonka will need a little luck and a whole lot of magic – along with some help from a few friends – to fulfil his destiny.
Because if you’re lucky enough to meet Willy Wonka, anything is possible…
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Books, Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews