Review: Wonka (2023)

The thing you should know about Wonka is that it is more of a Paul King family movie than a Roald Dahl adaptation. King is the British director behind the two acclaimed Paddington movies from the past decade, and he has also worked extensively in British television. Wonka is very much of a piece with Paddington 1 and 2 in terms of the twee tone, the gentle whimsical humour, and the stylized production design that evokes classic children’s book illustrations. With Wonka, however, there is the addition of musical numbers.

Wonka is conceived as a sort of legacy prequel to the famous 1971 adaptation of Dahl’s most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The 1971 adaptation was retitled Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and it starred Gene Wilder as the mysterious chocolatier. In Wonka, the chocolatier is played by our current go-to young eccentric actor, Timothée Chalamet, who deserves credit for being game to play both a sci-fi warrior-messiah (as Paul Atreides in Dune) and a whimsical musical chocolatier in a matter of months. The film introduces us to Willy Wonka, a young man setting off to open a chocolate shop in the Galeries Gourmet. The home of other famous chocolate makers, the Galeries Gourmet is located in an ambiguous, snowy European city that looks something like Copenhagen. Given the costumes and cars, the setting appears to be sometime before the Second World War. A few of the musical numbers involve callbacks to songs from the 1971 movie, such as the “Oompa Loompa Doompa-Dee-Doo” song, and the bizarre orange-skinned and green-haired look of the Oompa Loompas from that film is the same here. One of the villains in the chocolate cartel that is trying to stamp out Wonka is Slugworth (played by Paterson Joseph), the same villain trying to steal Wonka’s secrets in the original film. Although Wonka functions as a legacy work in these respects, in other ways the film departs from the Gene Wilder film as well as from Roald Dahl’s style as a storyteller.

Most divergent is the depiction of the character of Willy Wonka. Like Paddington in Paul King’s movies, Chalamet’s Wonka is naively good-natured and trusting of other people. Perhaps the mischievous and sometimes mean Wonka in the book and old movie is a product of years of isolation and fighting off corporate spies (sent by Slugworth). Either way, I was left wondering how this supposedly earlier personality developed into the later. Chalamet does fine in the musical role and with some of the humour; other times, such as when trying to convey the more manic side of Wonka, he’s like a second-rate Johnny Depp character (for the record, though, I did not like Depp’s portrayal of Wonka in Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation). Chalamet never comes close to the sly mischievous humour and careful insistence on delivering justice that made Wilder’s portrayal such a lasting delight, and certainly (even if the 1971 adaptation is not perfect) the definitive portrayal of the character on screen.

The supporting cast contains some highlights. Olivia Colman’s nasty Mrs. Scrubbitt, who runs a hostel and laundry and uses the fine print to entrap wayward guests, reminded me the most of a Dahl baddie. Keegan-Michael Key is amusing as the greedy chief of police, who grows more and more fat as he consumes more and more blackmarket chocolate. Other notable performances include Rowan Atkinson as the corrupt chocoholic dean of a cathedral and, of course, Hugh Grant’s delightfully dry portrayal of the Oompa Loompa, Lofty.  

There is lots to like here even if the escapes and capers are never very exciting, and the whimsical coincidences are never quite convincing, and the tone is too oh-so-nice for Roald Dahl. Dahl’s books depict a world of mean and wicked people, who will get their comeuppance, but the hero will also have to learn to defeat them not just through passive niceness but rather through cunning and shrewdness and wisdom. As in a fairy tale, in Dahl’s books, fools are punished, and wisdom is learning to survive and thrive in a world of good and evil. Wonka includes some of this, but there’s also an omnipresent equation between virtue and niceness which rings a bit flat and off, especially for Dahl.

At the same time, I appreciate a children’s film that does not run on the mean banter, irony, and rude humour that pervade most children’s and family movies today. In fact, the film’s fart jokes show that bodily humour can be done in different tones and ways. And that’s in keeping with Dahl.

Overall, Wonka is better than the “legacy prequel” premise suggests but not a smashing success. We’ll see how much the Roald Dahl Story Co. continues to waterdown his works through their barrage of recent adaptations. I expect we might even see Wonka 2.

6 out of 10

Wonka (2023, UK/USA)

Directed by Paul King; screenplay by Simon Farnaby & Paul King, based on characters by Roald Dahl; starring Timothée Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Grant.

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