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I truly believe Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka movie is still the best Willy Wonka movie
22.12.2023 - 16:19 / polygon.com / Tim Burton / Willy Wonka / Johnny Depp / Roald Dahl / Best
“Hеre is the child that you left behind. Here is the kid with the curious mind. Here is the wonder we used to feel, back when the magic was real.” These are lines from “A World of Your Own,” a song performed late in Wonka, the 2023 movie starring Timothée Chalamet as a young version of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. The song keys into a frequently stated motivation for this movie’s version of the character: He wants to use his candymaking magic to create a feeling of childlike wonder in his customers, and indeed, the whole world.
That’s what Wonka director Paul King and his Paddington 2 writing partner Simon Farnabywant, too: to conjure the magic of Dahl’s children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,and perhaps more so, the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the most beloved adaptation of the book so far. But while this desire to commune with the spirit of the 1971 film may move nostalgic audiences, it also further underlines a truth about the three big Wonka movies so far: Tim Burton’s 2005 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the only one of them that really gets the material right — and that actually nails the character of Willy Wonka.
This sounds like sacrilege, mainly because Gene Wilder’s performance in the 1971 movie is wonderful, and deservedly adored. By contrast, Johnny Depp’s 2005 interpretation of the character as a pinched, condescending recluse is already off-putting even before you delve into how Depp’s long-beloved eccentricities have been recontextualized in recent years. (Dahl himself has also been reevaluated over the years, so that sort of discomfort doesn’t necessarily go away if you ignore Depp.)
But Depp and Burton capture something crucial about Willy Wonka: the sense of a creator enamored of his own world, regardless of how he comes across to those outside of it. Part of what’s so compelling about Wonka in Dahl’s book is the brusqueness of his enthusiasms. He has an artist’s stubborn vision of what his audience will and should enjoy. His desire to make a better class of candy is almost militant.
That attitude informs his tacit view that the children on the tour of his factory deserve the various mishaps that befall them, because they’re spoiled, greedy, impulsive, and so forth. Readers are expected to agree, because we get a closer look at their backstories and pathologies. Wonka doesn’t have all of this information at the outset; he casually and confidently intuits their rottenness as only a childless loner can.
His nonchalant acceptance of their fates has less to do with an exacting moral calculus than with how they defy his particular sensibilities and rules, which he hopes children will follow attentively and instinctively. This is
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