It would have been more wrong than I can enumerate not to reference 1971’s WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in its prequel, WONKA. Hence the purple cutaway coat, the top hat, and not just the only possible Oompa-Loompa song, but also the signature wistfulness of “Pure Imagination” by Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newly. Screenwriters Simon Farnaby and Paul King (who also directed) have infused the dark whimsy of Roald Dahl’s aesthetic that combined the grotesque with the fanciful into this ambitious effort. And with they have succeeded admirably. This is not the world-weary Wonka of that earlier film, but the aspiring chocolatier full of promise and dreams who is about to learn some very hard lessons about the world. The journey may be bittersweet, but it’s full of wonder and a new interpretation of death by chocolate.
We meet the young Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) as he is bidding farewell to seven years as a seagoing chef. He has spent those years perfecting his recipes and gathering the exotic ingrediants, such as the salty tears of a sad Russian clown, in order to pursue his dream of bringing the best chocolate you ever ate to the entire world. Infused with the memories of the chocolate made by his poor but chipper late mother (Sally Hawkins who has a smile that lights up the universe), he finds that it will take more than 24 hours to make that dream come true. Alas, those dreams are stymied by his inability to read the fine print (or anything at all, for that matter), and the chocolate cartel that controls that industry in Galeries Gourmet, the home of the finest chocolate in the world, where he has come to seek his fortune. His initial success with a chocolate the buoys the spirt (and corpus) of the nosher falls victim to the machinations of that cartel, which waters down its product, and sneers at adding extras such as caramel (even that salted with those ci-mentioned tears).
WONKA has all the necessary elements of a first-rate fairy tale, the kind that the Brothers Grimm wrote, and not the sanitized versions foisted on children by parents rendered aghast by the pure evil in the originals. Here the evil is greed, and what it wreaks on the powerless, or as it is neatly summed up by one of the characters: the greedy beat the needy. There is a Dickensian quality to the story, primarily the establishment of Bleacher and Scrubbit, where Willy is forced to work of an impossible debt by doing mountains of laundry under conditions that make a Victorian workhouse seem like a union shop. Owners Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Coleman) and Mr. Bleacher (Tom Davis) ooze malice, while the carefully coiffed cartel of Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas), and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) are shorthand for the nefarious consequences of unrestrained and unregulated capitalism. Amid the magic of Willy’s battered top hat that contains all the necessities of life and chocolate manufacture, and the pure visual delights of effulgent art direction, the choreography that includes a balloon ballet on an extravagant glass roof illuminated from within, there is more than a whiff of social commentary. None of it subtle, but all of it fun in its bite.
This is due to Mr. Chalamet’s performance. He is not the best singer, nor the finest dancer amid the grand production numbers and solo spots with which the film is replete, but he brings an ebulliently innocent determination to the proceedings that enlivens even the darkest moments with a credible optimism, even if we in the audience are not influenced by the specially infused chocolates that have helped orphaned child and fellow launderer, the stoically pragmatic Noodle (Calah Lane), to see the possibilities.
The story itself is full of wild schemes, ingenious machinery, free-range flamingos, corrupt clergy, and a police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) whose moral compass revolves around chocolate, and whose girth increases as his ethics fall prey to the cartels’ plans becoming progressively more dasterdly, and requiring towering heights of confectionary bribes. And, yes, there is Hugh Grant as the petulant Oompa-Loompa dogging Willy and that only Willy can see. This is a haughty, caustic Grant, rendered into an effete orange, green-haired figure of tiny legs and 8-inches of stature spewing a sneering sang-froid derision at our hero. It may be the role he was born to play.
WONKA is sumptuous. As rich as a single-origin, 85% chocolate bar, it’s satisfyingly complex without adulterating the experience with cloying sentimentality or pedantic exposition. Of feeling and emotion, there is plenty, but all well-earned, as are the sweet bits of vengeance that this being a prequel so no spoilers here, the villains enjoy. Beware. You will crave chocolate. So much chocolate. And maybe a pirouette on the nearest glass roof.
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