But Hollywood is not a sentimental beast, regardless of how much fake-sentimental bullshit it churns out. And so everything anyone ever loved, if enough people loved it, will be mined and re-mined for box-office dollars, as long as we all choose to pay for entertainment, instead of, say, downloading shoddy-sounding Rush bootlegs for free. And so, a new version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with an almost hilariously clichéd modern-day pedigree. If you were to have surveyed Internet newsgroups circa '99 on who they'd like to see tackle such a project, the responses would have been extremely close to what the movie actually is: Tim Burton directing! Johnny Depp as Wonka! Danny Elfman doing the songs! And yet virtually everyone who might have posited these opinions are the same doofus fucks decrying the "sacrilege" involved in actually realizing the project! Well, who cares about that shit. By now, everyone should be in at least tacit agreement that the original Willy Wonka had as much working against it as for it. Cheesy songs, tacky scenery, and a generally dated aesthetic make that film hard to argue for, beyond that simple "I LOVED IT WHEN I WAS A KID!!! IT WAS SO MAGICALLL!!! HAW, HAW!!!!" sort of mentality. Gene Wilder was magnificently enigmatic, sure … but he also had to sing a bunch of B.S. Disney-style songs about "dreaming" or some shit. (Memo to self: save "B.S. Disney" for future pseudonym). Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adheres more faithfully to Roald Dahl's novel, not backing off from its dark hostility or questionable moral statements. Instead of trying to ply the material into something palatable, Burton has a lot of fun just playing with it, and is fully supported in the effort by Johnny Depp, in a wonderfully unpeggable performance that makes his role in Pirates of the Caribbean seem completely straightforward. The thing people tend to forget, when rose-tinting their childhood memories of the Wilder Wonka, is that this isn't, at all, a "magical" story. Dahl's outlook couldn't be more unforgiving of children or parents, nor more racist (the Oompa-Loompas, after all, were African pygmies in the book's first edition, and in both movies are explicitly slaves). Burton wisely chooses to sidestep any pretense of political correctness or moral prosthelyzing in favor of bringing out the general weirdness. This liberates him to just put on a fantastical show. Which he does, to a grand level. This film is as visually stunning as the Wilder version was chintzy, as uncompromising as that one was diluted. It's an imaginitive fantasy full of twisted jokes and an overall sense of oddity that is right at home with Dahl's book. The plotline is pretty much the same as it was in Willy Wonka, but Burton does a more comprehensive job of focusing the story on Charlie, keeping Depp's Wonka at arm's length to be observed as the freak he is, instead of celebrating Wonka as having some kind of brilliant ulterior motive, which he doesn't (and never did). To my great relief, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is mostly free of the creeping sentimentality of Burton's recent films (especially Big Fish). Burton is hailed (by people who think themselves "dark," but aren't) as a subversive filmmaker and one of the cinema's few masters of truly "black comedy." He isn't "black," any more than Edward Gorey was "black," or those "Emily" books are "black." (You know who's really black? Yaphet Kotto.) Burton is as sentimental as Spielberg, though in a seemingly opposite direction, and in any case he's as much of a brand.
Fortunately, Charlie is great for the brand. It's certainly the best thing Burton's done since Ed Wood. Not everything works; Elfman's songs are great, and even bring back a bit of the Boingo, but for the most part they dont really stick to the ribs. But ultimately the sheer imagination of this movie is more than enough to make up for the minor missteps. Bonus points for the best Christopher Lee cameo since Raw Meat.
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