It is said that one is supposed to get more jaded (read: wiser) with age. That’s obviously not so with director Paul King, best known to most as the writer-director of Paddington and Paddington 2. But to those who really know his style before it became obfuscated by the sugary sweet stylings of those two films, it was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh that lifted King up the ranks of British pop culture. Indeed, those two works were undeniably his launching point for writing and directing his own full-length feature, Bunny and the Bull, released in 2009, two years after The Mighty Boosh ended (but that didn’t stop Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt from appearing in King’s debut).
By aligning himself with the “quirk” and “offbeat stylings” of these two series, perhaps it became too easy to forget that he didn’t write them. That his own sense of “quirk” and “offbeatness” was entirely different. Entirely more attuned to the, shall we say, saccharine. And while that trait worked quite well for Paddington and Paddington 2, when applied to Wonka, it’s liable to give anyone with working tastebuds a stomach ache. Alas, it appears as though few people have their sense of taste at all anymore, with critics largely praising the movie via such sentiments as “Chocolate Factory prequel is a superbly sweet treat.” Many also seem to think that eradicating all traces of Road Dahl’s signature brand of darkness and cynicism is just dandy. As many also thought the same about censoring his work and then reprinting it for the purposes of adhering to “sensitivity reading.” In fact, in the same review that calls Wonka a “superbly sweet treat,” it is also said, as though it’s a good thing, “Timothée Chalamet leads a beguiling cast in a backstory that rinses away all sourness from Roald Dahl’s embittered chocolatier.” Does anyone care that that’s actually the worst possible interpretation of Willy Wonka, “origin story” or not? And, if Wonka is the so-called origin story it claims to be, where exactly is the part that’s supposed to tell us how he eventually came to be the child-hating (though that’s just good sense) misanthrope that we see him as in Gene Wilder form? Or hell, even in Johnny Depp form (to be sure, it’s been a real surprise to find that Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more redeemed now than ever as a result of Wonka‘s existence). What’s more, at least Depp’s Wonka had an actual origin story involving his father being an oppressive dentist who would never let him eat any candy, hence his adult enthusiasm for making it.
The absence of darkness (or what darkness there is being presented with a sense of “levity”) in Wonka begs the question: are people so starved for blind hope in the world that they can view the movie as a “much needed” beacon of light rather than taking note of how it not only eliminates the essence of Willy Wonka, but also inflicts a sort of terrified Pavlovian response every time one can feel another song coming on? Especially when it’s from Chalamet. To that point, there’s clearly a reason why the trailer for the movie did its best to conceal the fact that Wonka is a musical. Should viewers have expected that thanks to 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Perhaps. But one of many glaring differences between that version and this “companion piece,” as King calls it, is that the songs in the original film actually slap, while the ones in Wonka are either totally forgettable (save, of course, for the few they repurpose from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) or you wish they would please, god, please just end. This includes Calah Lane, who plays the “orphaned” Noodle, and Chalamet singing the ultra-cheeseball “For a Moment,” featuring such lyrics as, “For a moment/Life doesn’t seem quite so bad/For a moment/I kind of forgot to be sad.” Worse still are Wonka’s attempts at rhyming Noodle’s name with something, as he claims nothing rhymes with “Noodle” (clearly forgetting about “canoodle”), but, in truth, nothing rhymes with Wonka unless you turn “donkey” into “donka.” As in: Wonka sucks donka dick, and is a major insult to Dahl’s original character. One who would never, no matter how young and unjaded, sing, “Noodle, Noodle, apple strudel/Some people don’t and some people do-dle/Snakes, flamingos, bears and poodles/Singing this song will improve your moodle/Noodle-dee-dee, Noodle-dee-dum/We’re having oodles and oodles of fun.” If that doesn’t make one vomit into a bucket, it’s hard to know what will. Apart from King and his co-writer, Simon Farnaby (another The Mighty Boosh alum), incorporating a mama’s boy element into the script.
That’s right, of course Willy is suddenly a mother-obsessed man-boy who only dreams of making chocolate and selling it at the Galeries Gourmet because that’s what he told his mother (Sally Hawkins) he would do. She, in turn, promised she would be right at his side whenever he finally did. Unfortunately, her untimely death makes that all but impossible. That is, if this were a more realistic film. But again, as the critics have praised, Wonka utterly whitewashes and sanitizes everything for the sake of “effortless consumption.” Even the overt intermingling of Black and white characters at a time in history (“fantasy” or not) that wouldn’t have made it look so natural is yet another major signal of the movie’s overall sanitization. This being part of a larger trend in pop culture that might end up doing more harm than good in the long run as audiences are encouraged to pretend that racism never existed, and therefore doesn’t even exist now.
Nor does any trace of Dahl’s wryness. And sure, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory will always have the unbeatable benefit of being adapted for the screen by none other than Dahl himself (though he later disowned the script after it was given an uncredited rewrite by David Seltzer and then altered by director Mel Stuart). Not to mention the dark edge of Wilder portraying Wonka. In Paul King’s version, it isn’t just the unbearably corny nature of everything that makes it insufferable, but also the dreadful miscasting of Chalamet (and Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, for that matter), who makes Wonka read like an impish, dick-gobbling (remember: Wonka sucks donka dick) twink. Really, it looks like he just ate a big mouthful of shit from someone’s arse every time you see him…which doesn’t do much to make the chocolate in the movie seem appetizing.
Beyond that issue, there’s the wielding of the town’s Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key) as a source of “comedy” for being fat. A big “no-no” in today’s world, and one of the many details that have actually been extracted from Dahl’s books (that is to say, even mere use of the word “fat”). Nonetheless, the Chief of Police is portrayed as a weak-willed fatso who becomes fat because he’s being paid off in chocolate bribes by the Chocolate Cartel (not exactly high praise or good PR for the candy biz). This group consists of Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Gerald Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), all clearly based off Boggis, Bunce and Bean, the greedy triumvirate from a different Dahl story, Fantastic Mr. Fox (which Wes Anderson did a far better job of adapting than King has done with Wonka). Another “nod” to a Dahl story is Noodle, so overtly the “Matilda figure” of this narrative. But rather than succeeding as a “heartfelt homage” to Dahl’s work, Wonka is more like a hodgepodge of saccharine candies you didn’t really want, but you guess you’ll gorge on them because they’re there.
Genna Rivieccio
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