A chocolate factory, especially one overseen by Willy Wonka, is a perfect metaphor for a certain kind of modern filmmaking. An industrial complex that focuses on its magical output and would rather stare at the sun than at the labor that produces it; a business environment whose ingredients include Wonka’s sleight-of-hand salesmanship, eccentric artistry and chocolate cartel villainy.
Balancing these flavors is the tantalizing challenge that lures filmmakers to blockbusters. (And, let’s face it, they’ve got fewer and fewer options in front of them.) Where others were devoured by the gears, they alone can make the machinery bend to their will. Rarely does this hubris result in anything but another product off the line. The interchangeable parts required by blockbusters’ strict bean-to-bar recipe, dedicated to preserving an intellectual property’s image, discourage deviation. A worker in this chocolate factory stands out through efficiency or serendipity. There is a chance—one as small as finding a golden ticket in your Wonka bar—that a director’s personal flavor is exactly what the material needs, and becomes the standard to which all future products are held. There is a far greater chance, though, that their flavor will clash with the company formula. No matter how tasty your toothpaste, it still doesn’t belong in an Oreo. This is the case of Wonka, a disheartening and manic buffet of corporatized whimsy that shovels its gustatory dissonance down your throat.
If the chocolate factory represents the making of these movies, then drowning in this chocolate—like Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) and his patronized ward Noodle (Calah Lane) almost do in Wonka’s climax—is watching them. It’s certainly the experience of watching Wonka. It’s all dessert all the time; self-congratulatory cutesy nonsense, its heavy and calculated sweetness weighted by the leaden requirements of IP filmmaking. We’re caught in a decadent mudslide which consumes everything in its path. The debris might be momentarily delicious, crafted by best-in-class artisans with only the most joyous intentions, but overwhelming and monotonous. When you’re up to your chin in thick brown sludge, its taste is irrelevant.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has long been an unstable balancing act between Roald Dahl’s devious zing and commercial palatability.
The 1971 film, originally produced to sell Quaker Oats chocolate bars, pissed Dahl off because it favored Wonka over Charlie and featured musical elements which he found “sappy and sentimental.” The second movie, made with the Dahl family’s complete artistic control in 2005, ironically doubled down on its Wonka focus (this was now a necessity to keep the branding consistent) while removing the filter from Dahl’s off-putting, intoxicatingly imaginative, ridiculously colonial-capitalist source material. Now, we’re in the midst of a Dahl resurgence. Wonka accompanies Wes Anderson’s tetralogy of Dahl adaptations for Netflix, and the irony has only thickened: The cloying prequel is entirely focused on Wonka, entirely a musical, and entirely “sappy and sentimental.”
Maybe the only remnant of Dahl’s didactic mean-spiritedness is Wonka‘s corrupt Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key), a man whose purpose is to don larger and larger fat suits as he is bribed by villains with confections. He—and the decision to make this the film’s main running joke—is at odds with the rest of the sunny, sanitized Wonka world. The author’s scions read the writing on the Dahl, and determined that the most lucrative long-term strategy for their brand was inoffensiveness.
Like Wonka, filmmaker Paul King is no stranger to commercialism. He also has more reason than most to think that he can overcome it. His first movies defied expectations by giving the quintessentially British and quintessentially snuggly Paddington Bear a pair of adventures that cut their plush sweetness with tangy wit. It’s easy to understand why King and his Paddington 2 co-writer Simon Farnaby would be the top candidates for Wonka’s unwieldy origin story. It’s hard to swallow that their comic abilities were overpowered by an insipid task that feels more and more familiar.
Wonka’s intentions conflict with its material as deeply as its close companion film, Cruella, the 2021 villain prequel from Disney’s all-encompassing Nostalgia Division. That film, amidst its mall-punk aesthetic, asked us to both know all about Cruella’s future while also ignoring it completely; either we embrace this pop cultural paradox, or watch as empty references attempt to woo us into rooting for a woman on an inevitable march towards her dog-skinning future. Whichever camp you fall into makes for an uneasy tonal clash. Wonka finds itself in a similar conundrum. As a prequel recounting, as per the marketing copy, “the wondrous story of how the world’s greatest inventor, magician and chocolate-maker became the beloved Willy Wonka we know today,” we are intended to know who this kid is, and how he ends up. What a shock, then, to find out that Dahl’s jaded, punitive, kid-hating candy dictator began his extremely marketable career as a saintly little weirdo!
While not quite as villainous as Cruella, Willy Wonka has stuck to the roof of our culture’s mouth because of a tenacious and compellingly personal friction: He is both a purveyor of childhood daydreams—candy!—and a hostile, oddball misanthrope. One imagines Dahl, locked away in his shed banging out children’s books, writing himself into the top hat and velvet of his contradictory confectioner. Wonka, fresh from its board meeting, revises him into a manic pixie dream mascot.
Part of Wonka’s allure lies in his mystery, his unpredictability, his harshness. Wonder requires the full depth of the unknown, which includes danger, even if it’s just a hint. Without it, we have pretty, empty FX that allows treats to make us float—but never fall. Without it, we still have a feisty little do-it-all magician in Wonka, but one who merely keeps us occupied, not hypnotized. Chalamet presents his Wonka to us in charming, harmless Leading Man mode. He smiles the same smile he gives to red carpet fans as he takes soulless selfies, ripping through his lines at a rapid staccato. He sings, he twirls, he stretches his charisma thin. Every once in a while he breaks out of the mold, his angularity morphing into a little gremlin performing an inelastic imitation of Jim Carrey’s zaniness. Like so much of the movie, his stranger and more enticing tastes are coated in a thick, plain layer of milk chocolate. Chalamet is thankfully not trying to be Gene Wilder, though he sometimes skews near Johnny Depp’s off-putting performance simply by being so smoothed-down. You wonder how such a toothless character could even eat candy in the first place.
Following the Cruella template beat-for-beat, Wonka’s beginnings follow the same checklist of neo-heroic signifiers: An impoverished London creative who’s recently lost his single mother pulls off a series of ruses as he works his way through his industry’s underground to usurp the powerful kingpins in charge—while never giving up on his dream. Maybe that’s how these prequel filmmakers see themselves, as scrappy DIY artists pulling off heists while they try to undermine a system that will inevitably turn them into villains. Then again, maybe there are only two narrative arcs that studios approve.
The details are where King and Farnaby attempt to mix unwieldy chunks of absurdity into the doughy story. Wonka loses all his money during Wonka’s opening song…and is pressed into indentured servitude by a bumbling pair of forced-labor launderers (Tom Davis, Olivia Colman). Nobody will take a chance on Wonka’s treats…because a conglomerate of chocolatiers conspire to control the market, enforcing their monopoly through police violence. He rhapsodizes about his late mother (Sally Hawkins, slumming as a sobby piece of backstory)…who never taught him to read.
Yes, a major plot point is Wonka’s illiteracy, eventually rectified by Noodle, the young Black girl he carts around for optics’ sake. Who knew that one of the emotional cruxes of Wonka would be an orphan giving him the ability to read? Otherwise, he’d never be able to put together the contract that poor ol’ Charlie Bucket violates. Ah, nothing else tugs the corporate heartstrings the same way! You can see the whiteboard requirements haphazardly poking out from behind each instance of silliness, every depressing collision of imagination and obligation wilting with the desperation of a cubicle doodler. It’s worse when there’s nothing left in the tank to disguise the antifreeze-flavored references to the Wonka canon, presented as almost holy.
The ever-present three-note discord of “Pure Imagination” haunts Joby Talbot’s score, while Lindy Hemming’s Wonka costume is beholden to the industry wisdom that characters wear the same clothes throughout their lives. And if you think Noodle is actually going to stay a broke orphan unaffiliated with the legacy characters, I’ve got a magical chocolate factory in London to sell you. A detail representative of this sanctifying mindset is that Wonka’s cane—used as a character-building prop in the 1971 film when it sinks into some cobblestones, allowing Wilder’s Wonka to do a dramatic and doubt-inducing somersault—has had the image of “standing up by itself” co-opted as something “iconic,” something which deserves a callback and a magical little nod. When the cane stands alone in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, we are challenged. When it stands alone in Wonka, we are coddled.
This idea spills over into Hugh Grant’s rascally and refined Oompa-Loompa, who is the face of Wonka’s meet-loot relationship with the franchise’s perennially exploited people. Grant pours his sarcastic vocal charm into the dry bastard (who bashes Wonka with a frying pan), which makes his inevitable moral turn as unconvincing as the CG manipulating his shrunk-and-stretched body—and just as insincere as the rest of the film.
There’s a cynicism permeating Wonka and the team of diverse, characterless misfits he befriends along his way to industrial dominance. His collection of useful tokens (Natasha Rothwell and Rakhee Thakrar’s characterless treatment is especially egregious) help further his goals while they devote themselves to the spritely little genius. And poor, poor Noodle. White Savior Wonka allows a little Black girl to ride his coattails into the wondrous world of chocolate, freeing her from wage slavery along the way. Lane has little to do throughout the film and Noodle has no personality of her own; she’s mostly present so that Wonka isn’t just talking to himself. Well, that and to teach Wonka to read.
Throughout Wonka’s journey towards literacy and factory ownership (every child’s dream, to be sure), he sings about hope, family and home. None of these numbers from Neil Hannon are memorably affecting or funny, but range from saccharine to brain-glidingly forgettable. It doesn’t help that for every song that’s staged with inviting playfulness (like one where London’s people find themselves in a musical), there’s one that leans on randomness pulled from The Mighty Boosh’s pile of rejected ideas (like an extended musical scene spent milking a CG giraffe, which inspires flashbacks to another of Wonka’s atonal peers, Dolittle).
It’s when King’s invigoratingly imagined choreography, filled with physical comedy and dry humor, crashes headlong into the aggressive sappiness of the music that Wonka feels most like a waste. It’s when Wonka almost works. Director of photography Chung-hoon Chung enhances the bright colors and tangible, stagey settings of production designer Nathan Crowley, capturing the movements of a laundry as enticingly as the window dressing of a candy shop. Throwaway gags, like a church filled with chocoholic monks, are always funnier than the characters. These undeniable displays of ability, the struggling efforts of artisans stuck in a factory, are in service of something oppressively bland—and are swallowed up by it. Some individual performances, like the Grinch-grinning cruelty of Paterson Joseph as cartel leader Slugworth, similarly stand out, but even this contributes to an annoying trend: Joseph outdoes his cartelmates (Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton), but it’s partially because his character’s familiar last name earns him extra screen time. There’s always room for talent, but in movies like Wonka, it’s inversely proportional to originality.
The problem of Wonka’s suffocating sludge isn’t one that can be solved by, as Slate’s Sam Adams argued, bringing back the hacks to direct IP drivel. Adams observed that distinctive indie filmmakers like Justin Simien and Ben Wheatley were consumed by the studio line items of The Haunted Mansion and Meg 2, movies better served by shapeshifting, pliable, practical journeymen. But, though Wonka is lousy, it’s not because King’s personality was extinguished and that a director with an impersonal hand would perhaps make the film go down a bit more smoothly. It’s that King’s wry personality is visible—the only reason the movie is even halfway tolerable, in fact—and it’s fighting with Wonka’s substance in every frame.
The wreck of Wonka stings because of the clarity with which we see King’s eye for visual comedy and lavish setpiece staging, squandered on a movie where branding was always going to eclipse beauty. If some of the other filmmakers toiling in the chocolate factory were overpowered by the machinery of blockbuster studio filmmaking, King’s skills fell to the high-level creative checklists that increasingly accompany any whiff of IP. This chaotic cinematic kitchen always produces an inedible hodgepodge, the clashing colors of stakeholders and screenwriters mixing into a thick brown. And its production isn’t slowing down. Is it chocolate? Is it shit? It’s all the same when you’re up to your neck.
Director: Paul King
Writer: Simon Farnaby, Paul King
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Olivia Colman, Hugh Grant, Natasha Rothwell, Rich Fulcher, Rakhee Thakrar, Tom Davis, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
Release Date: December 15, 2023
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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