The Wily Filipino

Eye Candy.

I figure I must have read Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory back in 1981, and so, while watching Tim Burton's new film, I realized I'd completely forgotten the gleeful, childlike perversity in which Willy Wonka dispatches the children to their bloated, slimed, filthy and taffy-pulled fates. It's nothing new: it's an element that's both in Burton -- see Henry Selick's The Nightmare before Christmas, or Burton's second-best film, Edward Scissorhands -- and certainly in Dahl's work as well. (His almost cheerful introductions to the episodes of Tales of the Unexpected, mostly based on his short stories, belied the cruel twists that would happen at the end.)

Once you get used to this particular mindset, it's a little easier to enjoy the nastiness that Burton unwraps for us. (The audience, however, was unusually quiet throughout, even during a fantastic sequence where the Salts are whisked off to their doom by a battalion of trained Fordist squirrels. I imagine such a Gashlycrumb end was a little too traumatic for Berkeley parents; the Poeta and I were laughing out loud though.)

One of the members of a mailing list I'm on (rightly) guessed that the film would be visually beautiful but completely lacking in warmth and soul. I'm happy to report that the first half hour, at least, is rather touching, with its portrayal of the good-hearted Bucket family. But Burton milks this whole nobility-of-poverty theme for all its worth; it's seemingly earnest, but their suffering clearly borders on caricature, as does most everything else.

"Visually beautiful" is what one inevitably gets in a Burton film, and viewers expecting eye candy will not be disappointed: the psychedelic rivers of chocolate, candy machines designed by Rube Goldberg, the incongruous homage to Kubrick close to the finale, the snow-blasted dreariness of Northern England (or wherever it's supposed to be). Some would probably argue that Johnny Depp is the most "visually beautiful" element in the film, but here he's reduced to cheekbones and unnaturally straight and white teeth -- with his large sunglasses, he looks like a cross between Bono and Dr. Caligari, with a dash of Freddie Mercury thrown in for good measure.

This is where the film squanders the sweetness earned at the beginning, once the focus of the screenplay moves from Charlie to Willy Wonka. (There's little narrative suspense in any case, even for the kids in the audience. The simple morality of Dahl's tale is set up so that the odds are totally stacked against the other children, who are practically embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins; the enjoyment in the film comes from seeing the factory interior and waiting for the children to be eliminated, a la Battle Royale.) Depp, who is probably one of the best actors of his generation, draws from some well in outer space for his Wonka, and the result is off-putting. His Keith Richards impersonation in Pirates of the Caribbean garnered him critical acclaim, but at least he was endearing there; here, it's a series of stoned non sequiturs and unnatural grimaces.* Funny, yes, but Paul Reubens probably did it best for Burton over two decades ago.**

*The equivalent, if you will, of those squeals and hiccups everytime that other manchild, with his arrested adolescence, pancake-makeup face and proprietor of a similar fantasy world, would sing.

**I would also have been happier watching the film if the lone Oompa-Loompa wasn't played by a South Asian man, which therefore raised the specter of the extraction of labor from colonized, colored people. But Deep Roy's role is actually more interesting -- as the Poeta pointed out, he's the Greek chorus, after all, singing Danny Elfman's songs -- and he has a couple of surprise appearances that complicate his apparent servitude.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 21, 2005 09:02 AM