Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

I watched this the other night, just a couple of weeks after I saw (and panned) the gaudy remake with Johnny Depp. Strangely, the original, while warmer and filled with less artifice, made me appreciate the new one more than I had upon first viewing. Wonka loses points for deviating often from the original story, but gains a lot from the performances of the two young girls, Denise Nickerson (Violet) and Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca), and Gene Wilder as the titular candy icon.

Even from the opening credits it is clear how this is a much less faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The movie puts Willy Wonka front and center instead, an odd choice considering we don’t even see him for the first third of the film. The story still focuses on our hero, Charlie Bucket, played with a wide-eyed, if a bit ham-handed glee by Peter Ostrum.

Wonka also deviates by making the story a musical one. There are a few numbers in addition to the Oompa-Loompa songs found in the book, and while they are charming, none is really effective or memorable after the opening number, “The Candy Man.” The Oompa-Loompa songs are dressed up in odd ways as well, even going so far as to display lyrics in increasingly decorative typefaces. The movie is very much a product of the era in terms of production. The song-and-dance stuff is a little too artificial, which might be said also of the special effects and set design. I would not be one saying that, however. While certainly not as massive or as detailed as in the remake, the sets and props in this Chocolate Factory have a great charm that recalls the machines of Dr. Seuss. The special effects wizardry of the remake proves once again that bigger is not always better.

Another high point of the original adaptation is Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka. Johnny Depp hung his Wonka hat on the oddity of the candy magnate, a hermit who never quite fit in. Depp’s Wonka, while feared, was socially inept and a bit, to put it lightly, on the peculiar side. Gene Wilder plays Wonka with more whimsy, more heart. The key though, to his performance, is an undercurrent of anger and resentment, best portrayed in a scene near the end of the film, inside Wonka’s office.

After seeing this original, I realized the remake did many things right that this film did not. In Wonka, Charlie’s father is inexplicably absent. While he doesn’t have much to do in the remake, the reinstatement of the father is very important to the relationships between Charlie and Grampa Joe and of course between Willy and Charlie. The remake was also wise to focus the story on the character Dahl actually calls “our hero” in the first pages of his book, young Charlie Bucket. This puts a lot of pressure on the young Freddie Highmore, but he was able to create a much stronger Charlie than Wonka‘s Peter Ostrum.

In the end, my enjoyment of this film over the big-budget remake comes down to the low-budget charm of the sets and production along with the great performance by Gene Wilder. The real trick of Willy Wonka, though, was to make me reassess my opinions of the remake. Somewhere in between these two movies is a great adaptation of a beloved book, but put together, they’re not as bad as I once thought.

Wonka: B
Charlie: C+