Director – Paul King, Screenplay – Simon Farnaby & Paul King, Story – Paul King, Producers – Alexandra Derbyshire, David Heyman & Luke Kelly, Photography – Chung-Hoon Chung, Music – Toby Talbot, Songs – Neil Hannon, Visual Effects Supervisor – Graham Page, Visual Effects – Framestore (Supervisors – Robert Allman & Carlos Monzon), Host VFX & Outpost VFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Hayley Williams, Prosthetics Designer – David Darby, Production Design – Nathan Crowley, Choreography – Christopher Gattelli. Production Company – Heyday Films.
Cast
Timothee Chalamet (Willy Wonka), Calah Lane (Noodle), Paterson Joseph (Slugworth), Olivia Colman (Mrs Scrubitt), Keegan-Michael Key (Chief of Police), Tom Davis (Bleacher), Hugh Grant (Oompa-Loompa), Jim Carter (Abacus Crunch), Matt Lucas (Prodnose), Mathew Baynton (Fickelgruber), Rich Fulcher (Larry Chucklesworth), Rahkee Thrakar (Lottie Bell), Natasha Rothwelll (Piper Benz), Rowan Atkinson (Father Julius), Sally Hawkins (Mamma), Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (Officer Affable), Freya Parker (Miss Bon-Bon), Simon Farnaby (Basil), Charlotte Ritchie (Barbara), Paul Wang (Colin), Ian Bartholomew (Sceptical Old Man), Ellie White (Gwennie)
Plot
Young Willy Wonka arrives in the city, determined to make his fortune as a chocolatier. However, he is driven out from selling in the Gallerie Gourmet by the big three chocolatiers who maintain a monopoly on confectionary sales in the city. With his meagre supply of money soon gone, Willy accepts an offer of lodgings with Mrs Scrubitt, only to fail to read the fine print in the contract and find in the morning that he now owes her 10,000 crowns. He is then thrown into her laundry until he can work his debt off, which will take years. The others confined in the laundry conspire to help Willy sneak out in order to fulfil his dream of taking his magical chocolates to the world and defeat the three manufacturers even as they conspire to use the police force against him.
Willy Wonka is the most famous creation of Roald Dahl (1916-90). Wonka first appeared in Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), which was made famous through the film adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), featuring Gene Wilder as Wonka and with a screenplay from Dahl. The film was not a success in its original run but in years subsequent gained a cult following. It was later remade by Tim Burton with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, while there was also the animated Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (2017), which inserts the cartoon characters into the story.
Wonka is directed and written by Paul King, who emerged out of cult British tv like The Might Boosh (2004-7) as director of Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017). King co-writes with Simon Farnaby who co-wrote Paddington 2 and also plays the role of the security guard at the zoo. Farnaby is better known as the ghost of the pompous politician in the British tv comedy Ghosts (2019- ). (Farnaby brings a couple of the regulars from that series, Charlotte Ritchie and Mathew Baynton, with him).
The film is produced by Heyday Films, the production company headed by British producer David Heyman, who have been behind the Harry Potter, Fantastic Beast and Paddington films. It does strange things to think of how the Harry Potter and Paddington films come from the same production team and essentially inhabit the same exaggerated fantasy version of England – it would take little stretch of the imagination to see all three interacting and Willy Wonka as a rogue Hogwarts student. (Indeed, Willy’s knowledge of obscure potions and plants from around the world make him essentially a variation of Newt Scamander).
Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka
Wonka had several marks against it even before I sit down. One is the cynically commercially motivated notion of creating a prequel to a work that needed no prequel. The second is my dislike of the smugly self-satisfied presence of Timothee Chalamet, who looks like a self-entitled preppie who walks though every role he is in oblivious to anyone else or the belief that the entire show does not centre around him. The third is that when Wonka opens it, it is a Musical, of which I am not a fan. I suppose I can’t be too hard on the film as that was what the original also was, although the Tim Burton film was not.
Despite this, Wonka impresses in a great many ways. It has an extraordinary cast in even minor roles of the people in the street, using it feels like just about every member of British Acting Equity. Among these, the scene-stealer of the show has to be Hugh Grant as the Oompa-Loompa. The production design is superbly creative and the sets do an amazing job of dazzling the eye and looking lavish in every scene. The film is certainly a treat for the eye.
And what you cannot deny is that Paul King comes up with some spirited and colourful choreography of the musical numbers. And there are even times that King delivers some quite magical sequences – such as the ones with Timothee Chalamet and young Calah Lane sneaking into a zoo to milk a giraffe and then taking a flight across the city on a handheld cloud of balloons. King gets the colourfully absurdist world that the original existed in right, even if the complaint would be that he softens it down to more the cute and cuddly world of the Paddington films.
Willy Wonka (Timothee Chalamet) and Oompa-Loompa Hugh Grant
The main issue that hangs over Wonka is that it is a film that has no need to exist. Willy Wonka and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are works that are perfectly self-contained. Maybe others do, but I had no burning need when I came away to ask who Willy Wonka was and how he clawed his way up to fame. It is another work akin to the Star Wars prequels, Leatherface (2017) and the tv series’ Bates Motel (2013-7) and Gotham (2014-9) that takes iconic characters and dilutes the effectiveness they had (usually as villains) by creating elaborate backstories that laboriously explains how every aspect of the mythos came to be. The only real answer as to why is that Willy Wonka is a lucrative IP and people felt it could be spun out for more. The big question is why nobody bothers to go back and film the actual Willy Wonka sequel that Roald Dahl wrote, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972).
The other issue is that Wonka and Willy Wonka seem to be two similar-looking films about different people with the same name. What this film seems to forget is that both the Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp versions of Willy Wonka were quite sinister figures who were more than happy to create fates that kill four different children (you can debate whether his intention was deliberate, which has being going on ever since the original came out) but the fact remains that children found Wilder’s Wonka quite a scary figure. By contrast, Timothee Chalamet’s Willy Wonka is a standard wet-behind-the-ears ingénue trying to make his way in the world and there is nothing sinister or menacing about the character. What Wonka resembles is fairly much any rags-to-riches biopic of a successful artist or businessman – indeed, what it has more in common with now is Chocolat (2000) about how magically empowered chocolatier Juliette Binoche survives the slings and arrows of a hostile village and transforms their prejudice with her magical chocolates than it does Dahl or either of the Willy Wonka films.
