"Wonka" - Film Review
Welcome Willy Wonka back to the big screen. Wonka introduces the audience to the chocolate maker long before he’s the world sensation we know him as today. Willy (Timothée Chalamet) is a young, aspiring magician and chocolate maker who dreams of opening a shop in the famed Galeries Gourmet of Europe. He only has a few coins to his name, but he’s confident he’ll be okay once the people taste his chocolate creations. One might think it would be easy to open a shop here, but this town is secretly run by a Chocolate Cartel (Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, & Mathew Baynton) that bribes the local police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) to run any competitors out of town. Together with a ragtag team (Calah Lane, Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Rich Fulcher, & Rakhee Thakrar), Willy is determined to make his chocolatey mark on the world.
The problem with recent movie musicals that contain original music is that they seem to have forgotten what a song adds to a story. Songs aren’t meant to be slight, meaningless deviations that exist simply to classify the film as a musical. They should serve a purpose and offer insight into the emotional state of the characters. In Wonka, the songs reiterate what’s already been said in dialogue, which makes them feel unnecessary and shoehorned into the film. It’s a problem if all the songs could be removed without impacting the plot. And call me old-fashioned, but the magic of musicals is in the unattainability of the vocal performances. Few people can pull off “Defying Gravity,” although many have tried. Most of Wonka’s songs are talk-singy, even when Willy makes a chocolate that forces people to sing like they’re in a Broadway show.
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The story of Willy Wonka is meant to be strange. We’ve seen that in Gene Wilder’s and Johnny Depp’s iterations of the chocolatier, and in Roald Dahl’s original story. And of course there’s the way he manages his chocolate factory and (definitely) willfully murders child contest winners. Wonka is most compelling when it leans into the world of magical realism that the story begs for. The man has cotton candy clouds in his factory, edible mugs of chocolate, and an ever-present top hat a la Mary Poppins’ bag. Wonka should not have a single moment of normalcy. It should have the maximalism of the Wachowski Sisters’ Speed Racer. Few movies have the freedom to go absolutely off the wall. Wonka is one of them, but you wouldn’t realize that in this execution.
Wonka is one of many retellings and prequels that’s made its way into theatres this year, and it’s not even the only prequel in theatres at the same time. It’s sharing the screen with The Hunger Games: Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds. The problem with prequels, especially when written after the source material, is that the audience will always have the original source in their minds. Chalamet is passable enough that one can see hints of Depp and Wilder in his performance, but he is far more restrained. The problem is that this version of Willy, one who is gentle and kind, doesn’t logically grow into the Willy of the Dahl story. The entire runtime of Wonka is Willy putting the needs of others above his own. This Willy would likely be concerned if he saw a child sucked up into a chocolate pipe, but that doesn’t mean he makes for an intriguing story on his own.
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