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From Page to Screen by Anita L. Burkam Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has achieved iconic status, having entered the cultural lexicon as shorthand for gluttony (Augustus Gloop), spoiled brattiness (Veruca Salt), and eccentric genius (Willy Wonka). Yet even considering the broad reach of the story in its previous media incarnations, it was still high time for a remake of the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. That version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, now seems visually dated and steeped in seventies psychedelia. Tim Burton’s new Charlie, however, featuring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka and Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket, faces new and different problems. While serving as a careful custodian of the now-emblematic images created by Dahl (Augustus Gloop being sucked up the pipes, for instance), director Burton does his best to revamp the story, modernizing the characters and adding a new subplot about Wonka’s troubled relationship with his father. Yet he doesn’t go far enough in addressing his Titanic problem, which is this: how do you get viewers to invest in a story if they already know how it’s going to end? Granted, due to the high turnover rate of child media consumers, not all of Burton’s audience is going to be familiar with Dahl’s story, and for these newcomers, the movie will be completely satisfying. In an era of high expectations for summer blockbusters, it has the artistry and cinematographic chops to captivate its audience. Dahl wrote in such immediately accessible images and with such fluid pacing that he’s a natural for the transition to film, and Burton hews very closely to Dahl’s text, lifting visual details and dialogue straight from the book. He also uses his medium’s visual advantage to heighten some of the emotive aspects of the story, making Charlie’s initial poverty so extreme that the Bucket family’s entire house leans at an impossibly precarious angle and snow falls in very prettily through a hole in the roof. This visual exaggeration contrasts humorously with the Bucket family’s cheerful nonchalance (“Nothing goes better with cabbage than cabbage!” Mrs. Bucket says about their meager supper), establishing a Dahl-esque magical hyperbole that sets the tone for the upcoming visual and emotional segue from grim industrialism to the larger-than-life characters and vividly colored, imaginative scenes inside the chocolate factory. To address the problem of engaging viewers who already know the story, Burton begins with a few character updates. Of the children who accompany Charlie inside the factory, Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt are two for the ages, but Mike Teavee was stuck in a 1960s cowboys-and-Indians rerun, and Violet Beauregard’s gum-chewing habit seems less the scourge it did forty years ago. The updated know-it-all Mike Teavee, airbrushed (as are all the Golden Ticket holders except Charlie) into a parody of the hyper-perfect modern media child, now adores violent first-person-shooter video games and sneers at the ease with which he hacks into the Golden Ticket system (“A retard could figure it out,” he says). Violet’s record-breaking gum-chewing streak has become only one aspect of her competitiveness, nurtured by her pushy, trophy-hoarding stage mother. You can view a clip showing each of the characters at http://www.iesb.net/videointerviews/charlieclip4int.php — the clip is the requisite introduction scene in which Willy Wonka first interacts with the five Golden Ticket holders individually, and it’s tidily done, with only a sentence or two for each character. It’s also one of the first places the movie raises the question of how much Wonka already knows about the kids and how much their fates are predetermined. Was it more than shortsighted greed on the children’s part and lack of sufficient OSHA regulation on Wonka’s part that led to the accidents with chocolate pipes, chewing gum, squirrels, and TV transmission? Dahl’s original Willy Wonka, though careless, is not mean-spirited, declaring that the Golden Ticket holder he “liked best at the end of the day” would be the winner of his factory. Johnny Depp’s Wonka, on the other hand, offers the factory to the “least rotten.” In movies as in books, slight shifts in emphasis can result in radical shifts in interpretation, although in movies, a much more collaborative medium, it’s harder to know whether the director, the screenwriter, or even the actor is responsible for any given shift in emphasis. Is Willy Wonka actively trying to do the children in? Depp’s performance suggests so. In print, Wonka is highly enthusiastic and energetic, bubbling over with the excitement of sharing his factory with the Golden Ticket holders and just a little under-concerned about the accidents that befall them along the way. “‘Off we go!’ cried Mr. Wonka. ‘Hurry up, everybody! Follow me to the next room! And please don’t worry about Augustus Gloop. He’s bound to come out in the wash. They always do.’” Depp’s Wonka, on the other hand, is alienated and reclusive, somewhat arrested developmentally (his voice is a childish chirp), and actively hostile toward children. His little-boy-lost interpretation puts many viewers in mind of Michael Jackson (although in interviews, Depp denies using Jackson as a model), but he is eminently charismatic, edgy, unpredictable, and highly watchable. By his deliberate lack of urgency during each accident, and his pauses, eye rolls, and insincere assurances afterward, he leaves open the possibility that the dangerous temptations of the chocolate factory have been specifically engineered to dispose of the bratty children. This lack of urgency, often shared by the children’s parents, comes across as a quirky touch in the book, a tacit admission that even the most doting parents have moments in which they wouldn’t mind seeing their offspring pushed down the garbage chute. The movie, however, leans more heavily on the tip-off wink underlying the whoops—either the children aren’t in real danger, since no one seems inclined to rush to their aid, or no one cares one way or the other if they are in danger. Their comeuppance almost takes on the preordained aspect of ritual Kabuki theater, which, in this late stage of the Charlie mythification, it might as well be. As in the book, each elimination of a Golden Ticket holder is followed by the Oompa-Loompas dancing and singing a cautionary song about the vices the victim was prone to: for Burton’s film, Danny Elfman created new songs for the Oompa-Loompas using Dahl’s original lyrics in a variety of musical styles, with Elfman’s own voice overlaid as both chorus and digitally altered lead vocals. The Oompa-Loompas themselves are all digital iterations of dwarf actor Deep Roy, further shrunk by cinematic sleight-of-hand to knee-height, wearing a number of vivid costumes and performing Bollywood-style dance numbers. Children’s literature aficionados will be interested to know how the movie approached these problematic little people, with their checkered history of race- and size-related insensitivity—the original print edition portrayed them as black pygmies from deepest, darkest Africa, and although outcry in the seventies (http://www.roalddahlfans.com/books/charoompa.php; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oompa_Loompas) forced Dahl to write them into their less controversial fictional form, the book’s primitive people from “Loompaland” still “love dancing and music,” are always laughing, work for cacao beans, and serve as hapless guinea pigs for Wonka’s candy experiments. In the 2005 movie, their guinea pig role has been toned down to a few relatively innocuous incidents, but their primitiveness is still played for laughs, with scenes in the jungle showing them in grass skirts, eating mashed-up green caterpillars, speaking by means of sign language and bird calls, and bowing before the cacao bean as to a god. Despite this, Roy’s Oompa-Loompas are a serious and mostly silent set, and Burton extracts a higher grade of humor from the contrast between Roy’s gravity and the Oompa-Loompas’ fantastical situations, hamming it up for the music video sketches in Mike Teavee’s cautionary song or looking on like tiny, solemn owls in their TV-room protective goggles. The Oompa-Loompa shown scribbling on a pad and raising an eyebrow while Wonka psychoanalyzes himself on the couch—or the one emerging as the literate baritone whose voiceover narration is heard throughout the movie—cleverly repudiate some of the dehumanizing stereotypes the role has had in the past. There are several other hints in the movie about Wonka’s possibly intentional riddance of the beastly children (including Charlie questioning Wonka on how the Oompa-Loompas could have known Augustus Gloop’s name), but the film lets the ambiguity remain at the end, adding to the unpredictable edginess of Depp’s portrayal. With his fastidious revulsion at the selfish children and even the subtle distancing of his purple latex gloves, Depp’s performance is carefully calibrated to grow out of the subplot Burton added about Wonka’s dentist father: in flashbacks, we see a young Wonka imprisoned in excessive orthodontic headgear, denied Halloween candy, and abandoned after he declares his intention of studying confection-making. When the grown Wonka demands that Charlie likewise abandon his family if he wants the chocolate factory, it reveals the long loneliness of the bizarre candymaker, as well as his inexperience with and ignorance of normal family relationships. Charlie, naturally, refuses to leave his family, introducing uncertainty to the foregone conclusion and enriching the relationship between the two characters, which is only cursorily sketched in the book. Here, Wonka has a lot to offer Charlie materially, but in return, Charlie has a lot to teach Wonka about how families care for one another. But is that complication enough to solve the Titanic problem and engage viewers who already know how the story is supposed to end? I admit I felt intrigued each time the film opened a window on Wonka’s never-before-seen childhood, as well as when the story jumped off the rails of Dahl’s plot at the end. Even so, the psychological history of the candymaker seems an inappropriate elaboration on and diversion from the simplicity of the original story. I was reminded of Ron Howard’s movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, where the screenwriters supplied psychological background on the Grinch’s childhood, concluding that teasing by other children was responsible for turning him into the Grinch he was. In the same vein, Wonka’s cartoonishly cold and withholding father can be blamed, via some facile pop psychology, for his son’s inability to bond with others. But cinematic therapy, offensive under any circumstances, is even more so in a children’s story: one of the virtues of a children’s story is that sometimes things just are, the way sometimes things in a child’s understanding just are — without reason or explanation. It was enough for Dahl that Wonka was a bit of a nut who ran a chocolate factory. Do we have to know any more? Does exposing his feet of clay make him more human, or does it merely draw us away from our uncritical immersion in the myth? And do the oversimplifications of pop psychology cheat young people (or any people, for that matter) who are trying to get a grasp on narrative, characterization, and motivation? Freddie Highmore delivers a charming, natural performance as Charlie, and to the extent that the revisions to the plot allow for greater interaction between him and Wonka, the movie redeems itself. The two actors share a vital chemistry first seen in Finding Neverland, where Depp played J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, and Highmore played one of the Llewelyn Davies boys, supposedly Peter Pan’s real-life model. Here, the idea of a grown, successful chocolate maker seeking advice and help from a little boy is easy to imagine because of the actors’ natural affinity. I still think, though, that the emphasis on Wonka’s redemption is a diversion from the true story kernel. It’s easy to become distracted by the Wonka showboat role, but Dahl knew that at bottom, the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is kid-in-a-candy-store wish-fulfillment fantasy of the highest order, and that’s Charlie’s story, not Wonka’s. Perhaps Burton’s update would have fared better if he had kept that primal fact in mind.
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