Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Made in 1971, this film originally flopped at the box office due to a lack of marketing and due to the general public’s unfamiliarity with the story. After several showings on TV and after its VHS release, however, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory began to enjoy success and became a family classic. The film made Dahl’s characters come to life in vibrant colour and led to a new fascination with Willy Wonka and the mysterious Oompa Loompas. It was remade in 2005 by Tim Burton, this time under the original title of the book.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was directed by Mel Stuart and stars Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. The plot is rather familiar, as it follows the quest of several children to find a Golden Ticket and the subsequent tour of Wonka’s candy factory as a result of finding the ticket. The plot mainly centers around the polite and gracious Charlie, played here by Peter Ostrum in what would be his only film role. Charlie is the best of the children, as he is morally honest and ends up being the rightful winner of Wonka’s entire factory as a result. The drawback to this film version was the notion that Charlie actually wasn’t that honest and had tasted the fizzy drink with his grandfather when nobody was looking. Nonetheless, it somehow works.
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka is a treat to watch. He is the perfect mix of dark comedy and light family fun, as he weaves his vision of Wonka through the path of deception. It was said that Wilder would not play the role if he couldn’t do the opening scene with Wonka faking a limp only to flip out of it. Wilder noted that setting up this instantaneous distrust of Wonka was integral to his direction with the role, adding that the audience had to have no real way to figure Wonka out as a character until all was revealed. It was this notion and direction towards playing the role that made Wilder the ideal choice and the perfect fit.
The Wonka factory itself is a vision, too, showing off tons of colours and nearly psychedelic reveries with ingenious set design. The film is a great mix of light explosive colour and dank darkness, rolling Dahl’s vision on to the screen with more depth than the Welsh author ever imagined. Dahl apparently hated this film version so much that he refused to give any of his stories up for film adaptations again. Obviously we all know how long that stance lasted…
The children represent the moral compass here, as each child is deplorable and reprehensible in his or her own way. The performances here are tremendous, as the children simply grate on the nerves of the viewers with their actions and their squeaky notions about life and everything in it. A special nod goes to Julie Dawn Cole as the tremendously vile and spoiled little brat, Veruca Salt. All of the kids, save Charlie, are met with some sort of unfortunate “accident” to which the Oopma Loopmas offer a commentary of sorts in song and usher the poor inflated or chocolated or shrunken or dropped child into some other locale within the Wonka factory. These segments serve as notions towards morality, which in turn teach children about the perils of all of the important things in life that they ought not to do, like watch too much TV and chew too much gum. Of course, the morality employed here is more than that and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory becomes as much a meditation on greed as it does on fun and adventure for the whole family. The notion of “good things come to those who wait” is especially true of Charlie, here.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a colourful and enjoyable yet oddly dark and eerie moral cautionary tale that serves as both delightful entertainment and frightening allegory. It is a classic piece about morality and politeness in the face of absurd strangeness, about keeping your head during moments of madness and unfamiliarity, and about keeping your loved ones close and remembering them even when it’s easy to forget them. Wilder is great and the whole film is a colourful jumble of musical magic.
8/10
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