The first thing that needs to be said about Willy Wonka is that he never murdered anyone.
That should be qualified, I guess: he never murdered anyone that we know of. In all his various incarnations, no reasonable observer could rule out the possibility that he’s killed many times that we’re never shown. He seems the type.
But it really does need to be made clear: in no book, and in no movie, does Willy Wonka murder a person.
So you can have lots of laughs over your funny tweets and little jokes about all the murder in the chocolate factory, but you are technically guilty of defamation and Willy Wonka would be entirely within his rights to sue you, if fictional characters were able to gain legal standing. And I think they should be, if only because the class action against George Lucas would be something to behold.
But back to Wonka and his lack of recorded culpability for innocent deaths.
In the book, and in the 2005 Tim Burton movie, it is actually made quite explicit that the kids and their parents are fine: they are actually seen at the end leaving the factory alive and well. A little altered, admittedly: Mike Teavee got stretched too much and is now elongated, and Violet is going to be permanently purple, but they’re basically fine. All that happened to Veruca and Mr Salt is they got covered with garbage, so all they need is a shower.
In the 1971 movie, you don’t see the survivors, but Gene Wilder’s Wonka assures Charlie that they’re all going to be fine, and since this is late in the film when Wonka is in basically-normal-and-a-bit-tired mode rather than his earlier deliberately-trying-to-scare-everyone mode, it seems a sincere assurance. We have no reason to disbelieve him, and if you want a reason TO believe him, you could always consider the fact that the filmmakers are trying to make us like Willy Wonka, and having him be a serial killer might militate against that. Besides which, the Oompa Loompas specifically sing that it’s not Veruca Salt’s fault she’s a bitch, it’s her parents’ - what kind of elfin dealer in poetic justice would Wonka be if he killed Veruca for character flaws she’s not responsible for?
In the 2023 prequel, of course, Timothee Chalamet’s Wonka isn’t even implied to be a murderer, although we do have to be honest, he recklessly endangers the life of a child and several adults in the course of his insane pursuit of capitalist dreams.
OK, Willy Wonka is not a murderer. That’s out of the way.
I have always said - and by “always”, I mean, “since 2005, when I saw Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” - that Burton’s adaptation is a better film than 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which changed the name of the book for no good reason and was directed by someone I don’t know the name of without looking it up because he is so uninteresting1.
I stand by this.
HOWEVER.
While Burton’s film is the better film, Gene Wilder’s Wonka is a better Wonka than Johnny Depp’s. This is no slight on Depp, who is one of my favourite actors and whose portrayal of Wonka I actually really like. It’s just to say that Wilder as Wonka is beyond sublime and should’ve won an Oscar. His Willy Wonka is definitive - and also much closer to the Wonka of Roald Dahl’s book than Depp’s jittery, insecure man-child (as fun as a jittery, insecure man-child who is also getting his kicks by punishing awful children in creative ways can be).
It’s just that, central chocolatier aside, Burton made a much better movie.
For one thing, the kids in Burton’s film are better. The quality of the juvenile cast in 1971 varied wildly. Julie Dawn Cole was great as Veruca and the kid who played Mike wasn’t bad. The girl who played Violet sucked and the boy who played Augustus Gloop was just a fat kid whose only job on set was to be fat.
But where the movie really dropped the ball was with Charlie. He is played by Peter Ostrum, who was only ever in one movie and grew up to become a dentist. This was a smart move by young Ostrum, as the one movie he did was proof positive that he had no talent at all.
Charlie, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is awful. He’s annoying, he’s whiny, he’s insufferable. He never stops bitching, making his mother’s life harder than it already is by showing up to her workplace in the middle of the night to complain about not finding a Golden Ticket, thus forcing her to interrupt her busy night of laundry-stirring to sing a terrible song that Charlie doesn’t even hear because he’s already left.
And that’s on the list of the movie’s flaws, too: Mrs Bucket sings a song the purpose of which is to cheer her son up, but she doesn’t sing it until he’s out of earshot. What is the point, woman? Also, she sings, “Me and Grandpa Joe will make your troubles go away”, which besides being a lie, is a slap in the face to three poor old invalids who are doing their goddamn best.
Anyway.
Ostrum is terrible, but he was just a kid and most kids, even ones who act professionally, are awful at acting. But Charlie is a shithead even if you disregard the unconvincing nature of his portrayal.
Let me be blunt: HE STOLE FIZZY LIFTING DRINK.
This is actually the one big flaw in Wilder’s Wonka: he should not be forgiving Charlie for stealing. Or if he does, he should forgive the other kids for their transgressions. Charlie did what they all did: went into the factory and the second he got the chance, broke the rules. There is no logical reason why four children get punished for being little pricks, and one child gets everything his heart desires for also being a little prick.
Oh yeah and the Everlasting Gobstopper thing, I guess, but that was actually entrapment, and if they sued Wonka they’d win.
Unlike the other kids, Charlie is actively encouraged in his crimes by his adult companion: Grandpa Joe is not the voice of reason here, he joins his grandson in flouting Wonka’s rules and disrespecting their host. He behaves despicably, and there is a reason for this: he is a despicable man.
In the Bucket house there are three people who are disabled and cannot leave their bed. There is one person who can leave his bed but is too lazy to do so until there’s something in it for him. Grandpa Joe had twenty years in which he could’ve stood up and helped Mrs Bucket out as she struggled to keep her family from starving. He did not.
What’s more, when he stands up, he DANCES, as if to rub in to Charlie’s mum that he’s been fucking with her all this time, and sings I’ve got a Golden Ticket. Which he fucking DOESN’T. CHARLIE has a Golden Ticket, you grasping old bastard, and he could still choose to take his mother with him.
Which is another reason Charlie is a shithead, of course: his mother works herself nearly to death to support a son and four decaying near-corpses on her own, and when Charlies has the chance to do something nice for her, he’s all, “Hey Grandpa Joe, join me in kicking Mom in the guts, won’t you?”
All this is a problem for the movie, because Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory wants us to believe that Charlie and Joe are good guys. And they’re just not. They’re arseholes of the first order.
So we’ve got bad child actors, easy-to-hate protagonists, objectively immoral decisions presented as good, a terrible song sung in illogical circumstances…
Oh yeah, the Oompa Loompa songs suck too. Come on. You know they do.
Oh and there’s also Bill the Candyman. It’s funny, I always think of him as the Candyman because he sings the song “The Candyman”, even though in that song he makes it clear that the Candyman is not him. Weird, right?
That’s not important, though. What’s important is that while Willy Wonka, as established, is not a murderer, Bill definitely is. You cannot possibly watch the opening scene of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory without knowing, for a certainty, that Bill has dozens of children’s bodies under his floorboards. There are mysteries in movies - is McCready the Thing, is Deckard a replicant - that we can argue over. “Is Bill a child murderer” is not one of them. He is.
What I’m saying is, as lovely a movie as it is, as wonderful a central performance as it features, and as much as we all revere it because we saw it a million times on TV when we were kids, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a very flawed film.
A much more flawed film than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Tim Burton, despite giving Johnny Depp free rein to create a Wonka quite unlike Dahl’s, otherwise pays great respect to the source material by including much more of it in his movie.
For one thing, the Oompa Loompa songs in Burton’s film actually use the lyrics from the book - which are much better than the lyrics that replaced them in the 1971 movie. These excellent lyrics are set to music by Danny Elfman that is way more fun and interesting and catchy than the 1971 dirges, and accompanied by very cool and funny dance sequences. In 1971 capturing the effects achieved by Burton in his musical numbers with Deep Roy playing all the Oompa Loompas was probably not feasible in technological or budgetary terms, but the fact that the makers had excuses for making their songs duller doesn’t change the fact that they ARE duller.
Besides which, changing the songs from the ones in the book and making them boring and creepy isn’t a budget issue.
Also, the Bucket family is more like the one in the book than the 1971 version managed. For one thing, in Burton’s film Charlie has a mum AND a dad, just like in the book. Why they killed Charlie’s dad off for the old movie I’ve no idea. Seems harsh.
But the Buckets, besides being much more Dahl-esque in 2005, are also just plain better. Grandpa Joe is a sweet, humble old gent, just the kind of guy you want alongside you on a chocolate factory tour - especially since in this version it’s made clear he used to work for Wonka. And the other grandparents actually get to be characters in this one, rather than just hideous zombies gazing terrifyingly at Charlie from time to time.
But most importantly, Tim Burton gave us a Charlie we actually want to see get rewarded, rather than a Charlie we want to see get sliced into tiny pieces by the fan at the top of the Fizzy Lifting Drink room. For a start, the whole “stealing Fizzy Lifting Drink” dumbness isn’t in this movie, because a) it’s not in the book and b) it’s a terrible plot point that actively works against the rest of the story. We also don’t get the “will you be a spy for Slugworth” storyline, because we don’t need it - in the book the difference between Charlie and the other kids is that they’re all awful and he’s nice. That is enough: you don’t need to introduce the decision of whether or not to engage in industrial espionage to underline it. Especially when the only reason you would need it is that you’ve invented another extraneous storyline that makes the nice kid as awful as the others.
Cutting out dumb plots aside, Charlie in 2005 was just better. Better acted, of course - Freddie Highmore did not grow up to be a dentist because unlike Peter Ostrum, he was always good at acting. Highmore’s Charlie is good and generous and big-hearted and kind and just nice to be around. When he gets the factory, you’re happy for him. When Ostrum’s Charlie gets the factory, you foresee bankruptcy for Wonka Corp in less than a year.
In general, the events of Burton’s film hew closer to those of the book - eg, squirrels sorting nuts rather than geese laying golden eggs, people being English etc - with the major exception of Wonka himself. For, just as the personality of Wonka, in Burton and Depp’s hands, is very little like Dahl’s creation, his backstory is different too. Inasmuch as, in the movie, he HAS a backstory, which in the book he doesn’t.
At least not a backstory that goes back before he was a chocolate-maker, that is: interestingly enough, the Burton film DOES include the anecdote about Prince Pondicherry from the book, which the 1971 film omits because it needed more time to include depressing laundry singing.
In Burton’s film, we see that Wonka embarked on his career in reaction to his strict father, a dentist (and possibly a former child actor) who allowed no sweets.
Now, there’s no real need for this backstory in the movie, and I’d say it should’ve been excised, except for two facts:
It is the cause of an absolutely inspired sight gag during a flashback that made me hoot with laughter
Wonka’s dad is played by Christopher Lee, and if you can have Christopher Lee in your movie, I reckon it’s fair play to shoehorn in whatever superfluous backstory you like to get it done.
I think the fact that Burton’s film has more bits you can recognise from the book is part of its appeal, but there’s also the fact that it’s just flat-out better executed. It’s better written, better acted, better directed, and funnier - Gene Wilder is fantastically funny in the 1971 film, and Roy Kinnear is great, as is David Battley as Charlie’s teacher, but there’s a lot of lame gags outside those three. Burton’s effort has a killer cast being really funny from beginning to end. Where it does change the book - the different takes on Mike and Violet for example - it makes sense and works.
And there’s a big factor looming over all of it - the world Burton creates is a more magical one than they managed in the seventies. It’s a marvellous storybook world, both inside the factory and outside it, and it leaves 1971’s flat, America-via-Munich nothingness in the dust.
That’s probably why, when they came to make last year’s Wonka, even though it is clearly a prequel to the Gene Wilder movie, they gave the production a distinctly Burtonish aesthetic.
Wonka is a beautiful movie, and achieves the miraculous feat of overcoming every very good reason why making it was a bad idea. What was a good idea, however, was getting the writer and director team of Simon Farnaby and Paul King, creators of Paddington 2, to make it. Another good idea was packing the cast with Britain’s finest actors and comics - Jim Carter, Olivia Colman, Tom Davis, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, and wonderful wonderful Paterson Joseph, they’re all brilliant. Plus, for comedy nerds like me, lovely cameos like Isy Suttie, Phil Wang, Farnaby himself. And Keegan-Michael Key, of course. What I’m saying is, they got the right people in place. And like William Goldman said, getting the right people in place is half the battle2.
And Timothee Chalamet was the right people. I don’t want to like Timothee Chalamet - I don’t want to like anyone called Timothee. But I can’t in good conscience not like him, because against all known laws of the universe, one scrawny floppy-haired young dandy is somehow the perfect choice to play both Paul Atreides and Willy Wonka. Which is ridiculous, but there you go.
Mind you, I don’t know if he’s perfect for Wonka because he encapsulates the character as we know it, or because he’s created something new that is nevertheless brilliant. It’s not really Wonka as we know him, but you can imagine, if you want to, this Wonka becoming Wilder’s Wonka (not Depp’s Wonka, though - Chalamet’s Wonka had a loving mother who he adored, and doesn’t carry anything like the complex interaction of traumas that produced the Depp edition). Chalamet’s portrayal, though, more than anything, fits the spirit of the film like a glove: funny and knowing but at the same time sincere and un-cynical. Grown-up and childlike simultaneously, which, even if the movie invents things Roald Dahl never thought of, I think is quite fitting for a film in the Dahl-verse (if less violent and gleefully disgusting than the author himself might’ve made it).
The only problem I have with Wonka is that it makes the effort to connect itself directly to Wilder’s version, and while it’s clear - if only from the design of the Oompa Loompa - that that’s the Wonkaverse it exists in, I’d have preferred the lines be a bit more blurred. Mainly because once you view the events of Wonka as leading literally to the events of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, some plotholes open up which are a little distracting. Fortunately they only come at the end, kind of as an afterthought so they don’t really spoil anything while you’re watching it.
And you should watch it, if you haven’t already. Let this stand as my declaration: there are three movies about Willy Wonka and I love all of them. Wonka because it’s better than I’d ever have expected, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it’s better than most people will admit, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, because, given its many and sizeable faults, it’s better than it has any right to be.
And because in all three, Willy Wonka is NOT a murderer.
Mel Stuart, apparently. See?
He said something like this, anyway. He probably put it better. He’s the one who wrote “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, Prepare to die.” I’d never claim to put anything better than he did.