When Willy Wonka, who was played by Gene Wilder, entered the stage of Mel Stuart’s 1871 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, the film had already patiently constructed one’s expectations towards an excentric character that owns a chocolate factory – the best in the world – which nobody had visited for decades on end. When the doors to the factory open and Wilder comes out, limping towards the gate, your breath is simply taken away, only to be regained when he executes a jump and welcomes the children with his apparent lightness, which will be constantly contradicted in the wild adventure that will follow.

That’s what’s missing from Wonka, the new film directed by Paul King about the youthful adventures of the chocolatier performed by Timothée Chalamet: a moment, any moment, where you’d hold your breath because of tension, mystery, possible danger or idiosyncrasies that would shake you out of sweet comfort even just for a moment. It’s like tasting some chocolate with crushed hazelnuts until they disappear altogether instead of whole nuts.

The plot is set in a nameless town, with a Victorian feel and look that is sufficiently generic and multi-colored to induce a sense of Christmas fatigue, rather than a sense of transcendence, akin to that of floating chocolates. One of the film’s merits is the fact that is combines CGI with a lot of practical effects, and manages to be more than just a series of screensavers, while its set design, choreography, and music, although not memorable, are pleasant, almost touchingly classical when it comes to the tradition of musicals. The adventure is set in a timeless space that has little to do with the fruitful “once upon a time” of folk tales; the twist rests on social dichotomies that are in part Dickensian, in part capitalistic, as both manifest just as powerfully.

The young Willy doesn’t have a penny in his pocket, but he “has a dream”: to share his eccentric chocolates with the whole world. From the first night he arrives in town, he’s tricked into a cheap lodging at Mrs. Scrubbit’s Laundromat and into signing a contract with lots of illegibly written paragraphs, only to find out the next day how many extra costs have been added to his bill and that he’s forced to work at their laundromat for 27 years to pay off his debt. Then, when he tries to sell his chocolates in the Gourmet Galleries, he is hounded by the Chocolate Cartel, composed of the delicious Slugworth-Prodnose-Fickelgruber trio, villains who bribe the police to handle the “competition” with mountains of chocolate safely hidden in a secret basement lying under a church of the chocolateholic occult. That is to say, not even the holy things in life go unpunished by the temptation of sweet sin. From these two social machinations constructed based on the exploitation of “the poor”, Wonka manages to escape by using ingeniousness and ingenuity, in carefully choreographed “heist” and “great escape” musical sequences.

In the laundry room, Willy meets the group of fairy-tale helpers who will contribute, each in their way, to breaking out of captivity and getting his dream off the ground, a supporting cast that could have been exceptional if they’d been given a little more work from the script: Olivia Colman is the Scrubbit’s conniving innkeeper and together with Tom Davis as Bleacher, they make up an exploitative couple of innocent dreamers, Jim Carter is accountant Abacus Crunch who stands out in the laundry room gallery with a superb combination of gravitas and comedy, and Paterson Joseph plays nemesis Slugworth as a venal businessman on all fours who is worthy of being the leader of the cartel. The film’s delight is Hugh Grant playing a vengeful Oompa Loompa who comes by night to steal Wonka’s chocolates, but ends up rescuing the hero just to settle the score.

Little Noodle (Calah Lane) completes the array of secondary characters by becoming Willy’s best friend, confidante, and “his mission”: beyond his dream of selling chocolate, the promise he makes to her, “to give her a better life” once she gets to open his shop, becomes the impetus that carries the story forward. The two share the same wound: Willy’s mother died, Noodle’s mother abandoned her in the laundry room. There’s a recurring joke about Noodle suffering from “orphan syndrome”, a label through which an entire genre of literature that approached class struggles is diluted, adding it to the contemporary jargon of diagnostics. The orphan is no longer a social category (and, well, the society portrayed in the film is schematic and generic), but rather, a “syndrome”.

If there is one thing that touched me throughout the film, that was its second-to-last scene, when Wonka unravels the mystery of Noodle’s origins and the legendary “Come with me…” melody overlaps with the moment he takes her to finally meet her mother. This “Come with me…” invited one, in the 1971 film, to enter a test which will turn the “best child” into the factory’s inheritor, it was about Wonka passing the baton. Here, the song changes its meaning and is filled by the noble gesture that Willy does for Noodle out of the goodness and purity of his heart. Since one of the film’s main messages – delivered in absentia by Willy’s mom – is that “it doesn’t matter how good the chocolate is, it matters who you share it with”, you almost get sad when you know how lonely and cruel old Wonka is going to be locked in his factory with only the Oompa Loompa helpers as his sole companions.

Wonka opens with Timothée Chalamet’s infectious smile as he climbs the mast of the ship that brings him to town, and closes with him beginning to see his dream for himself; and in between the boy who returns after seven years of traveling all over the world to gather the strangest possible ingredients for his chocolates, and the petty entrepreneur who lays the foundation for the future factory that will make cinematic history, there is no change or maturing, no shadow that would make him memorable. And no memorable character can be constructed merely by relying on the doubtless talent of Chalamet (with this role and his two appearances on Saturday Night Live, the young actor seems to confirm the fact that he loves acting in comedies).

Of course, the tone here is of a family-friendly Christmas story, an unpretentious feel-good movie with no tensions whatsoever, and there’s nothing wrong about that; but this is where the film loses the most in comparison to the original. The sweet eccentricity of young Wonka is only portrayed as positive, played for comic effects that are spectacular, but fully lacking in mystery. “The power of imagination and dreaming” is voided of any meaning and magic only works as a ready-made instrument, as its flattened manifestation has nothing initiatory or transcendent to it, even if the forms that it takes are visually pleasing throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.

Wonka is available in Romanian cinemas, starting with the 15th of December.

Alexa Florescu

După 10 ani petrecuți în industria de carte, lucrează acum în publicitate. Are carnet de bilete la Elvire Popesco și abonamente la toate rețelele de streaming. Primul regizor pe care l-a cunoscut a fost Taika Waititi la prima ediție a festivalului de film horror de la Biertan. Când nu face account management și nu scrie despre filme, stă cu orele pe o insulă din IOR.