Viking Night: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
By Bruce Hall
September 7, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I said as much to someone the other day, to which they replied:
“What about Willy Wonka? That was good!”
I had to admit, I hadn’t considered that. Partly because I haven’t seen Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory since I was probably five. And, while the Tim Burton version was watchable, it didn’t exactly make me want to go back and catch the original. Then of course, there’s the fact that it’s a musical. Call me uncultured swine if you want, but I can’t stand musicals. I’ll grant you, song can be an effective and brilliant form of exposition. I can name exceptions (The Blues Brothers, Hedwig and the Angry Inch come to mind) of course, but by and large when people start singing in the middle of a story, it makes me nuts.
But I decided to give it a go, partially because I like making non-obvious choices when I can. But also because the one and only time I saw Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was so young that parts of it scared me. More than once in my adult life, I’ve been catapulted awake because I had a nightmare about Violet turning into a blueberry.
Laugh if you want, but childhood trauma sticks to your ribs. No doubt this applies to every child who visited Willy Wonka’s fabulous house of chocolate, forced perspective and existential despair.
Let me explain. Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is, of course, based on the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which everyone in America but me has apparently read. That’s because the best way to guarantee I’ll never read your book is to let me see the movie version first. And this one I saw fresh out of toddlerhood, so that’s a no-go. I can go book to movie, but not movie to book. It’s just a thing with me.
Anyway, the film concerns a kindhearted young boy named Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum). Charlie lives with his mother and all four grandparents (no word on what happened to the father). They survive, crammed together into a drafty one-bedroom flat. Charlie is an attentive student in school by day, and afterward he maintains a paper route while his friends hang out at the candy store. The money he makes he brings home to his family. Whenever he comes across a scrap of food he brings it home to share, where everyone spends a half hour nobly insisting that someone else take the first bite.
The Buckets are such friendly people, and seem so good natured about the horrifying squalor around them that you kind of want to punch them in the face – especially when Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) starts singing. That’s right. I basically just advocated theoretical violence against a fictional character who happens to be elderly. That’s because while I’ve said I don’t care for musicals, I’ve also said that I CAN appreciate them, under the right circumstances.
Well, these are not the right circumstances. I’m just going to come out and say that the songs in this movie are flat out terrible. I can’t remember the melody to a single one, except “The Candy Man Can,” but the person I’m hearing in my head is Sammy Davis, Jr. The person singing the song in the film is a terrible singer, just like pretty much everyone else in the cast. By the time we meet the kids, and they start singing, I was already angry at them because I’d had to listen to their parents sing first.
Yes. I became angry at the sound of a child’s voice raised in song. That’s how bad the songs are. Not even the innocent must sing them.
Speaking of the innocent, Charlie really only has one dream in life. Every day on the way home from school he passes Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The facility is locked down and gated, its owner having long since retreated into seclusion. But even though it looks closed, the factory still somehow produces the most beloved chocolates and candies in the world. And the only item on Charlie’s bucket list is to get a look inside.
As luck would have it, Wonka comes out of hiding to announce a contest. Five golden tickets have been randomly placed in Wonka chocolate bars around the world. Whoever finds them will become entitled to an exclusive tour of the factory – the first visitors in years. They’ll get a lifetime supply of chocolate, and a front row seat to the unveiling of Wonka’s newest confection. Apparently this is the chance of a lifetime, and the entire planet goes bonkers over it.
This film exists in a slightly askew, parallel universe that resembles ours, but everything is slightly heightened and stylized. Think the “Muggle” world in Harry Potter. This really is a storybook come to life, so much so that you can almost close your eyes and see the toy version of every character. But there’s a very dark streak of humor here as well. People go bananas over Wonka’s contest the way everyone in our world recently went out of their minds looking for imaginary anime characters in the middle of busy intersections.
Newscasters breathlessly track the progress of the game, at the expense of more important stories. Children turn against their parents. One woman considers giving her husband up to kidnappers rather than surrendering her supply of Wonka bars. It’s dark and funny, but also dry and uneven. It’s humor that makes you kind of short once but rarely actually laugh out loud. The tone bounces between “suitable for kids,” “Arrested Development” and “Salvador Dali fever dream.”
They really should have had Pink Floyd write the soundtrack to this, and I am absolutely not kidding.
Obviously, five lucky children find the tickets, and each has a parent accompany them to Wonka’s factory. Wonka himself (Gene Wilder, duh) is immediately creepy. Right off the bat, he coerces his guests into signing a confusing (and quite binding) non-indemnity agreement. He leads them through Byzantine corridors, plays bizarre practical jokes on them and answers their questions with cryptic remarks that sound like threats disguised as jokes. By the time they get inside the factory, everyone’s kind of afraid of him.
By now, everyone probably remembers the scene inside. The chocolate waterfall, the room where everything is made of candy, the Oompa Loompas, and the weird series of accidents that begin to occur almost immediately. Without giving too much away, it eventually becomes clear that what we’re seeing is essentially a fable – and that’s where things finally begin to get interesting. Once you’re able to view Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in this light it not only makes more sense, but you kind of wish everyone would stop breaking into song every few minutes. It actually feels unnecessary.
One of the reasons Charlie is so sickeningly sweet and kind is because the other children are so NOT that. They’re each obnoxious, entitled little dirtbags with no manners and no respect for authority. The most memorable is Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole), a little girl so irredeemably narcissistic someone named a rock band after her. In fact, as the film goes on, Wonka’s off-putting nature starts to look downright sensible. Credit should be given to Wilder – Wonka isn’t what you’d call a “villain,” but you’re never quite sure whether he can be trusted.
And whatever misfortune befalls whichever character, it’s Wonka’s RE-actions, rather than his actions that invite suspicion. It’s a nuanced performance, and a very bold one, quite frankly. It’s precisely because I do NOT like Willy Wonka that I can say Wilder completely nailed it. It’s the character’s ambiguity of purpose and seemingly amoral demeanor that makes him so borderline repulsive, yet so endlessly interesting. Just like a fable.
You have to stick around to the end of this one, otherwise you’ll never get the payoff you deserve for sitting through it. Everything does come together by the end, even if it’s hard to sit through at times. And it’s even maybe a little touching – or at least modestly heartwarming, before it’s all over. And by the way, although I came down pretty hard on the songs, there is a notable exception. The aforementioned Oompa Loompas – Wonka’s indentured labor force of tiny, green haired Donald Trumps – have by far the best (and most grimly sardonic) musical moments of the film.
The last thing I should point out is that certain…things happen to certain people over the course of the story, and their fates are not entirely made clear before the end of the film. THIS is what terrified me as a child, being the deep thinking lad I apparently was. So, add that to my existing prejudice against musicals, and you have my permission to tell people that Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not my favorite Gene Wilder film.
But it’s the only one that scared me so much that I still sometimes dream about it today.
Godspeed, Gene Wilder. You are the Sean Connery of Willie Wonkas.