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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
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Movie Review by AJ 
April 13th, 2006
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First of all, before I start on my review, there is one thing that I must get out of the way. This is, in no way, shape, or form, a remake of Mel Stuart's beloved 1971 musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In fact, the only thing that the two share in common is that they are based on the same book and feature some of the same characters. Tim Burton's new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a gonzo adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic novel of the same name, and while Dahl hated and publicly lambasted the 1971 version until his death in 1990, I think that he would be pleased with this creepy, dark, twisted, and occasionally disturbing interpretation. The Factory is back in business...
The story is familiar, but Dahl enthusiasts will be pleased to know that it is kept almost wholly intact (sometimes word for word) from that in the novel. Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore, who last year starred against Johnny Depp in the fantastic Finding Neverland) is a poor boy living in London, whose entire life is a series of disappointments. His father (Noah Taylor) works at a manufacturing plant putting caps on tubes of toothpaste. His mother (Helena Bonham Carter) is forced to stay home and make cabbage soup for every meal of the day while tending to little Charlie and his four ancient grandparents, Grandpa Joe (David Kelly), Grandma Josephine (Eileen Essell), Grandpa George (David Morris), and Grandma Georgina (Liz Smith). On one of these dull days, Grandpa Joe begins to recount to Charlie about the time he spent in the employ of the brilliant candymaker Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp). This takes him back to a happier time twenty years ago as Wonka startled people all over the globe with his wonderful new candy inventions. However, Grandpa Joe notes, spies from other candymakers eventually led to the closure of Willy Wonka's fabled chocolate factory, and from there, Grandpa Joe and the rest of his family were thrust into poverty. In closing, the old man tells Charlie that a few years ago the factory started up again, smoke billowing from the stacks, though no one has been into or out of the factory in all this time, and no one has laid eyes on any workers. Charlie goes to sleep that night curious and excited.
One eventful morning, signs are found posted all over the world announcing that Willy Wonka will open his chocolate factory to five lucky children and one parental concierge per child. How do these children get selected? By one of the greatest marketing ploys in history (one that has actually been used for years by Nestlé, makers of the wonderful newfangled Wonka bars)...they must buy Wonka candy products and find if they contain a mythical golden ticket! Charlie, without money to buy the candy, watches sadly as some of the most spoiled children in the world find golden tickets. First, it's Augustus Gloop (Philip Weigratz), an overweight child who never stops eating candy, even almost eating his golden ticket; then it's Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb), a wealthy child who forces her father to stop the production of his nut-shelling factory and have his workers unwrap Wonka bars; after her, it's Veruca Salt (Julia Winter), a stop-at-nothing, gymnastic brat who does everything she can to break records; and then it's Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry), a product of the post-MTV, post-PlayStation era who does nothing but play violent first-person shooter video games. Then, to Charlie's astonishment, he finds some money on the sidewalk and buys himself a Wonka bar...and finds a golden ticket! From there, he and Grandpa Joe are whisked into a brilliantly psychadelic world of candy, retro nostalgia, and moral justice.
In general, I am not the biggest fan of Tim Burton. While I loved his stylized tribute to the awkward and at times socially inept qualities of childhood which was Edward Scissorhands, and have been a long-time lover of the kooky and outrageously bizarre Beetlejuice, Burton's tendency to drop creative character development in favor of wacky set designs has always irritated me. This of course led to the ruin of his first two Batman movies, as well as the more recent Big Fish, which was a lumbering and dull paint-by-numbers moral story which never amounted to anything and seemed to ignore the fact that the benign father character was nothing more than an unlikable narcissist. Fortunately, though, Burton seems to have channeled the spirit of the late great Roald Dahl to produce a truly unique and wonderfully twisted fable that is not above being extremely cruel. It punishes the spoiled children unmercifully, and does it with a grin and a wagging parental finger that's a little lopsided and off-kilter, though that's all for the better.
--Full review at REELPICKS.CJB.NET--
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 | Jessica
Jan 31, 2007 10:16 PM
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| I think anything that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp work on it worth watch!!! Tim Burton is a genius !!! |
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