75. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton, 2005

This is, undoubtedly, the most recent film on the list, but, God, do I love it so. Obviously this is a different film from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is great, and I went to see this version of the Roald Dahl story with a certain amount of trepidation. Could it possibly compare? Well, the short answer is that yes, of course it can. Really, when I look back at Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the only thing the film has going for it, besides some decidedly campy, tripy visuals, is Willy Wonka himself. It’s Gene Wilder’s finest, non-Mel Brooks hour. He’s a delightful madman with just a touch of menace, particularly when on his canoe early on. “There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going.” Still, the rest of the cast is kind of bland and the visuals, for all their camp value, never really hit a home run. Well, Burton’s vision hits the ball out of the park. I’ll get to Depp’s Wonka in a second, but I want to talk about the rest of the movie first. The world of the 1971 chocolate factory ultimately seems hopelessly fabricated, as if you really are in a factory, a weird ass, coked up factory, but a factory none the less. Burton’s factory, however, seems natural, organic, as if you stepped into this place in your dreams. It is a strange and wonderful world full of convincing detail. It is a strange, chocolate dreamscape, with nightmares lurking just around the corner for greedy children. Look at the chocolate forest at the start of the factory tour. It truly seems to have grown in the factory and brilliantly melds a wonderful child's dream with hints of nightmarish fright. The darkness of the place, the strange shapes, as wonderful as it all is, it is also strangely foreboding.

The film also has a terrific sense of humor and wisely ads the same dark tint apparent in the scenery throughout the film and into the characters. There is, for example, something strangely menacing about most of the parents, particularly Missi Pyle’s Mrs. Beauregarde, Violet’s mother, a track suit wearing predatory prom queen type with every sort of sports medal imaginable and a drive to make her daughter just like her. The way Mrs. B looks at all of the fathers and, indeed, Wonka himself, a look of almost predatory sexuality, is both creepy and hilarious. David Kelly is also terrific as the wide eyed and creaky Grandpa Joe. I really can’t say enough about this performance, at once wise and childlike, much like Charlie himself. This guy really deserves an oscar nomination. And then there’s Deep Roy, Hollywood’s midget of the moment, as every single Oompa-Loompa. The Oompa-Loompa’s here are hysterical, from the Oompa-Loompa secretary, to the Oompa-Loompa barber, to the Oompa-Loompa psychiatrist, and, my favorites, the Oompa-Loompas running the puppet burn ward, and I still bust up thinking about the last Oompa-Loompa of the film, which is one of the finest bits of business I’ve seen in quite some time.

So, where does that leave Depp’s Wonka. Well, of course, Depp’s great skill as an actor is that he really is a chameleon. Each performance is entirely unique. Willy Wonka is nothing like Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, or Raoul Duke. Nor is he much like Gene Wilder’s Wonka. If Gene’s Wonka is mad, Johnny’s is positively unhinged. There is very little about Willy Wonka that is like a functional, living person. He is a childlike nut job with wisdom and rage and an odd innocence. He is a mess of contradictions, knowing at once what is right for the greedy little bastards on his tour but hardly knowing his own mind at all, although he seems perfectly capable of figuring it out for himself as long as there’s an ineffectual Oompa-Loompa psychiatrist sitting nearby. His reactions to the children are just as terrific, moving from disgust, to hatred, to disinterest, and, for Charlie, even an amount of admiration. He is a wonderful comic figure, mixed with just enough tragedy to make him at least as enduring screen madman as Wilder’s own Wonka.