Willy Wonka, but make it goth.

I’m not going to cover the plot of this movie, as I’ve pretty much exhausted the basic premise in the Willy Wonka post.  Instead, I’d like to talk about the interesting creative choices made in this film that I think, maybe, possibly, put people off of this remake.  This is a pretty close adaptation of the novel itself, and the family of Roald Dahl worked with Tim Burton to make sure the vision matched that of the late author’s.  The reason Tim Burton wanted to make this movie in the first place was because he disliked how the 1971 version translated the book.  The major difference between this adaptation and the novel is the addition of Willy Wonka’s backstory and the broken relationship with his father.  And… yeah.  It’s a choice.

I’m not sure what it is about Tim Burton movies and dysfunctional parent/child relationships, but it’s nothing compared to his depictions of misunderstood creative geniuses.  Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, he didn’t direct it, but he wrote it), Big Fish, Dumbo, Big Eyes…  So why not take one of the most famous literary creative geniuses like Willy Wonka and invent some trauma for him to overcome.

Sidenote: Like, I know this is a Disney parody, but I could not help but think of Shrek the first time I watched this.

This uneasy tone is set right off the bat with the opening credits chocolate making montage, replicated in sinister undertones, because this chocolate in built on PAIN.  Tim Burton also reused this intro in Sweeney Todd with the meat pies, which somehow makes me love that creative choice even more, like Mrs. Lovett is the Willy Wonka of her own murder factory.  

Instead of Willy Wonka limping into an excited summersault in the original, our first greeting at Wonka’s factory is from theme-park Small World-esque puppets that catch on fire.  Instead of a colorful, lit-by-sunlight chocolate room that the children look excited to explore and eat, Tim Burton’s version is shrouded in black like being buried in Willy Wonka’s dark candy prison, and the only person that looks excited to try any of the candy is Missi Pyle, god bless her.

Willy Wonka in this movie is just a weird, stunted man-child who never got over his daddy issues, and his factory and demeanor reflects this in every scene.  See, Willy Wonka’s father, brilliantly played by Christopher Lee, is a dentist that forbids Willy from consuming candy of any kind.  Willy is a prisoner of his medieval-looking dental headgear, and wishes he could experience the same joy from candy as his friends.  When he finally does get a chance to taste a piece of shitty Halloween foil chocolate, it starts a candy consumption frenzy which his father staunchly disapproves.  In fact, because Willy decides to learn how to make candy, his father literally picks up his townhouse and moves it to the middle of Siberia, essentially leaving Willy an orphan.  His father’s rejection made Willy disgusted by the concept of family, and he subsequently buried himself in his one joy – creating candy.  But you can still see his father’s influence, from wearing rubber surgical gloves so he can never truly touch anybody, and the pitch of his voice being high and delicate like that of a child.  He can’t even mutter the word “parents” and instead goes with “moms and dads” because that’s somehow better?  This depiction of a fragile Willy Wonka, when neither existed in the novel or the previous movie adaptation, is probably what garnered the most backlash.  I mean, we’re going from Gene Wilder’s most famous role to a tightly-wound, blue contact-wearing, Cheshire cat-smiling weirdo with a pageboy haircut.  The only good thing to come out of Johnny Depp’s depiction of Willy Wonka is this tiktok and nothing else.

Narratively, I understand why Wonka’s backstory was added, as it helps to explain why someone who already didn’t trust people would completely wall themselves off from society once they were betrayed by a few workers.  But having to resolve this plot point fucks with the pacing of the movie, as we’re left with a 10 minute epilogue where Charlie has to force Wonka to reconcile with his absent daddy.

After Charlie is the last child standing, Wonka offers his factory to him under one condition: he leave his family behind because you can’t run a chocolate factory with “a family hanging over you like an old dead goose”.  Charlie doesn’t even stutter – he outright rejects Wonka’s request because his family is the most important thing to him.  Tim Burton does do a terrific job at painting Charlie’s family as a safe, loving home with two parents that are trying their best to put food on the table and protect Charlie from the dire situation that they’re faced with.  It was really quite touching for Charlie to acknowledge and understand his family does what they can and loves him deeply.

Willy’s new candy inventions all taste terrible after Charlie refuses to help Wonka run the factory.  He asks Charlie what makes him feel better when he’s down in the dumps, and Charlie says his family, which Wonka scoffs at.  Regardless of his initial rejection of Charlie’s sentiment, Wonka asks Charlie to accompany him to the middle of nowhere artic wasteland where his father now lives.  What they discover is a shrine to Willy’s success, as the walls of his father’s house are framed full of newspaper articles tracking the history of the factory.  Wonka’s father recognizes his son after looking at his non-flossed teeth and they share a fucking awkward hug as Willy comes to understand that his father was just trying to protect him from dental rot, I guess.  The movie ends on a fairly sweet moment of Willy joining the Bucket’s for dinner, as he’s finally agreed to move Charlie’s family into the factory and assume a permanent place at their dinner table.

Do I hate this hard pivot that insinuates you should forgive your family members for scarring you for life?  Eh, not really, it’s fine for a movie “intended” for children.  But I do find it fairly interesting that each version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” has a different moral message at the end.

1964: If you listen to your elders and don’t fuck around with shit you shouldn’t, someone will give you a chocolate factory.

1971: If you want something hard enough, you can Secret it into existence.  Also, protecting IP is super important.

2005: Riches are OK and everything, but your family is the most important thing in your life.  Awwwww.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the “musical” part of this adaptation, because I’m not going to lie to you, when I saw Charlie on the movie musical list I was confused, as I didn’t remember it even *being* a musical.

This movie was the canary in the coal mine for how well Sweeney Todd would be adapted to film.  I feel like directors who don’t like musicals try everything they can to erase what makes the stage musical work in order for it to be taken “seriously” on film.  Not I, a genius film auteur, will tolerate the embarrassment of one singing their emotions, even in movies that are specifically made for children.  Instead I will insert childhood trauma sinisterly hidden behind porcelain veneer smiles.  

To be completely fair, this could have been a result of Tim Burton wanting to keep this movie as close to the novel as possible.  The only songs that exist are moral message tunes from the Oompa Loompas.

The songs from the Oompa Loompas are pastiches of different decades, and just like… colossally uncool.  I know, it’s a weird thing to complain that a musical features uncool songs, but like… they’re trying so hard to be hip and with it.  It’s cringe is what I’m saying.  Competing against the 1971 version wasn’t doing this any favors, either.  Those Oompa Loompa songs have weaseled their way into the public consciousness in a million different ways, so replicating them beat-for-beat would probably have gone more poorly than completely reimagining them.  But I’m not sure having one dude dress like a 80s hair metal band and pretend to rock out is the solution.  The only time I think these songs succeeded was with Augustus Gloop’s exit.

This is not to say that the actor playing every Oompa Loompa did a bad job – his deadpan face worked for the majority of the movie, and I can’t imagine how taxing it was for him to put on like a million costumes and refilm the same songs over and over again… With the exception of the creative choices made to Willy Wonka’s character, I think the other actors in this movie did a spectacular job, especially the child actors.  Charlie Bucket was adorable and timid, but strong in his convictions when he needed to be.  Vercua’s ability to morph from syrupy sweet to an utter monster on the turn of a dime was truly impressive.  You really believed that Mike TeeVee would grow up to be a school shooter, and Baby Bradshaw was probably my favorite as eyes-on-the-prize gum-chewing champion Violet Beauregarde.

Grandpa Joe was also adorable, and I appreciated he was more tied to the story by being a former employee at Wonka’s factory.  I loved his “as a young man” flashbacks that featured him looking exactly like an old man.  The humor in this is fairly charming, from the earmuffs gag, to the quip about cannibalism, and the puppet burn center… they all got a chuckle out of me.  

I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike Tim Burton outright, because I think this post and the one on Sweeney Todd may have painted it that way.  Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is one of my favorite movies of all time, and as a child I watched it over and over, along with the Beetlejuice cartoon.  My enjoyment of The Nightmare Before Christmas became one of my only identifiers in high school, and as a result I received several Hot Topic-purchased merchandise from my friends for every holiday and birthday.  Misinterpreting Edward Scissorhands as a romantic love story was one of my several cringe takes in college.  I mean, shit, he cast Christopher Walken as The Headless Horseman.  I like Tim Burton’s aesthetic and I appreciate his sense of humor; I just wish he would have leaned more heavily into the musical aspects of these movie adaptations instead of being afraid of them, because they both had promise.  Maybe his hesitation stems from the leftover trauma working at cartoon musical factory Daddy Disney.

I realize my opinion of this is not going to make me a lot of musical theater friends, but… I’m not going to give a whole-hearted condemnation of the Into the Woods movie adaptation, so, y’know… hot takes ahead.

I went on record in my Sweeney Todd review that Sondheim is not my favorite, and that Sweeney is an anomaly in my general opinion of his work. I usually find his musicals wordy, repetitive, and exhausting to listen to after a while. I’m not saying he’s untalented, cause clearly he is insanely successful and respected, but his style is not for me. If it’s not seven minutes of cannibal puns, I’ll pass.

I wasn’t even planning on exposing myself to the show before watching the movie because I had absolutely no interest. Unfortunately, Sideways recently released a video breaking down the musical motifs in the show, and mentioned there was a stark contrast between the original production and the movie. In fact, it was upsetting shadow of its predecessor, and missed the entire moral point of the musical. He referenced another video by Snugboy who made the case the adaptation was a failure, and I thought, great, I need to watch the show because now I need context. This sounds like a translation disaster, and after suffering through Disney’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, there was already blood in the water. My plan was to watch the show, then the movie, write up something, and then watch the Snugboy video and revel in how much we both hated the film. The 1987 recording of the show with queen Bernadette Peters is on Hoopla, so one night I sat down and watched it.

The original show is like 3 hours long, and it *feels* that long. There are a billion characters, and they crash into each other like golf balls in a dryer, minutely inching the plot forward and backwards until it finally crawls to a resolution at the end of the first act. Except not, because the second act, where the actual moral message is delivered, is another hour and a half of the show. For all that is going on, I will give it credit, the plot was fairly easy to follow (for the most part, a few notable exceptions I’ll mention below) and every character’s motivations were clearly outlined. But Jesus Christ, it’s the embodiment of chaotic neutral, and by the end I was fully checked out. I’m not going to rehash the plot here, but if you want a good summary of the show, please watch the Sideways video. His content is excellent and I will forever link it, even if sometimes I disagree with his overall opinions.

The next morning, I woke up nursing my Sondheim hangover, wondering if I could procrastinate watching this movie for another few months. Instead, I decided to be brave and regrettably renewed by D+ subscription so I could check out the movie adaptation. I’m already not a fan of the show, and the movie is supposed to be a thousand times worse, so I’m in for a world full of hurt, right?

I thought the movie was totally adequate. I’m even going to stick my neck out there and say they cut a lot of the fat of the original and better illustrated a lot of the conflict than the show did :dodges incoming tomatoes: I’m not saying it’s a movie I would ever willingly watch again, and that there aren’t things that were baffling and fucking uncomfortable, I’m just saying, the overall messaging is the same, and it’s easier to sit through.

Let’s start with the bad parts of the adaptation, and ease into the good, cause I feel like I need to earn the skeptics trust first:

• A lot of the jokes fell really flat. I don’t know how much of this was direction, or Emily Blunt in general, because I felt like she was the biggest culprit of this. The scarf line, overselling the value of the beans, and when she changed the tone of her voice to convince Rapunzel to let down her hair, were played so close to the chest. The whole hair stealing scene in general was malicious instead of comedic.
• I didn’t enjoy how abusive Jack’s mom was. I don’t like her much in the show; it made me uncomfortable watching her berate her son for his intelligence when he may or may not have a learning disability and it was played off for laughs? But at least it kinda sorta seemed like she did love Jack despite her feeling disappointed by him. In the movie, she’s constantly knocking him upside the head and berating him with no affection whatsoever, so I realllllly didn’t care that she died.
• Johnny Depp was UNBELIVABLY UPSETTING in this. I spent the entirety of his appearance on-screen cringing and screaming for him to stop lusting after a literal child. He’s licking his fingers and presenting his crotch to her over and over again. His character design, too, with his candy, cheap suit, and pedo moustache codes him as a sexual predator and it’s complete nightmare fuel. This is why it made me physically nauseous to listen to Red’s song later about him opening her up to new experiences. Get that shit out of here.
• Speaking of strange costume design, Meryl’s old lady makeup was really terrible, and the nails were truly unsettling and distracting.
• They should have included “No More”. I think the baker’s arc is still understandable in the movie, but it would have been nice to have this song included.

Now for the general positive aspects of the movie, and what I considered good creative changes:

• With the exception of the wolf’s suit, the costumes are impressive.

• I thought the actors sang pretty well. They’re not Broadway level, and I’ve already bitched about how annoyed I get when they don’t cast broadway actors in these things, but it wasn’t egregious by any means. Nobody’s performances stuck out to me as bad. I really enjoyed Anna Kendrick the most, however – she did a good job of balancing earnestness and comedy, along with some pretty stellar vocals. Bellas for lyfe.
• Christine Baranski. That is all. At least that’s all for now – I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about how much I love her in Mama Mia 2: Electric Boogaloo and Chicago.

• “Agony” was fucking hilarious. While some of the jokes of the movie did illicit a chuckle out of me, I was giggling incessantly watching this number. It’s acted and shot perfectly, and it was leaps and bounds more entertaining than the rest of musical numbers in the show and the movie.
• They cut the narrator and the dad out of the movie. I can’t imagine anybody arguing for the deadbeat dad to be around since he was added chaos, but a lot of people liked the 4th-wall breaking of the characters turning on the narrator, giving him up to the giant, and watching him fall to his death. There are two functions of the narrator they’d have to accommodate by removing him:

1. 1. The narrator’s death is supposed to articulate how cutthroat the cast is, and how reticent they are to place the blames on themselves for the predicament they’re in. The characters try and give up several other replacement people to the giant after the narrator dies, which proves the point anyway. While it’s a funny moment in the show, breaking the 4th wall never happens again afterward, and feels like a very strange way to get the narrator off the stage to allow the actor to play the father for the rest of the story.
   2. The narration throughout the show gives the audience the feeling they’re reading/watching a fairytale. By having the baker narrate instead, they fill that requirement, and also add a nice bookend to the story. The baker is the one telling this tale to his son at the end, so it makes sense that he’d be the one guiding the audience through the experience.
      • I will concede, however, that without the clear removal of the narrator, it does seem strange that the narration does not continue through the second half of the movie. The choice to include narration could be viewed as a way to make up for script deficiencies, as it was abandoned halfway through the film.

• The tone was a bit different and less comedic, but the original fairy tales are dark, so I understand why they did this. They’re literally cutting body parts off to shove a blood-soaked foot into a slipper, and it’s played as humor, but like, that’s fucking gruesome, right? There is so little humor in the second act of the show anyways, so I honestly didn’t miss it in the movie. This is also coming from someone who, other than at a few line deliveries from Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason, didn’t laugh much watching the Broadway show, either.

• I gave zero fucks about Rapunzel in the show, so I honestly didn’t care her and the prince fucked off at the beginning of the second act. She’s literally a disembodied voice 75% of the time, with the other 25% being motivation for the witch to feel betrayed and sad. Rapunzel only existed to prove that the witch’s actions of keeping her safe in the tower were motivated out of selfishness, and would ultimately create a rift between the two if Rapunzel were ever provided a better option. Once Rapunzel made the decision to leave her mother, that was all the devastation the witch needed to want to disavow humanity. She had nothing left to defend because she would never be able to repair her relationship with her daughter. She said herself, she’s not good, she’s not nice, she’s just right, and any opinion to the contrary would fall upon deaf ears.

• It was also much clearer the witch disappeared because she threw away the beans, invoking her mother’s curse again. She kind of poofs out of nowhere in the show, leaving me wondering if she’d come back later on.
• I also liked how they displayed the witch’s powers more prominently so it was better understood how much she gave up in pursuit of vanity. The special effects in general were a net positive, and a benefit of translating this to film.

• The baker’s wife actually showed interest in the prince before he started hitting on her, so it felt less out-of-nowhere when they hooked up. Not to say I supported this – this whole plot point is a weird detour, and honestly, it’s unneeded in the show and the movie. If the goal is to show the prince as being frivolous and untrustworthy, him abandoning his kingdom and running away from the giant would be enough for any person to be turned off by him. Cinderella was stepping up to solve the problem, and meanwhile her husband, the one in the true position of power, was wandering around the forest shirking his responsibilities. This would also mean they could cut the baker’s wife’s one-song wavering of her commitment to her new life, cause like, honestly, who cares? Songs that start a conflict at the beginning and resolve it by the end are filler in an already long show with too much shit going on in it.

• I found the plot a lot easier to understand in the movie. When I watched the stage show, I was so confused as to what the hell was happening during “Your Fault”, and had I not watched Sideway’s video beforehand, it would have been a garbled mess to me. When I watched the movie I understood the scene a whole lot better, and I thought it was because of how they shot it, focusing on each character intently when they were singing (I also had subtitles on, which helped). But it wasn’t until Snugboy mentioned they slowed down the song that the fucking lightbulb went off.
  • Sondheim loves to do this, create these songs with stupid fast tempos to make their characters seem panicked and flighty. Two notable examples off the top of my head are “The Worst Pies in London” and “Not Getting Married Today”. If one person is singing it’s easier for me to focus on, but if there are like 4 people with 4 different agendas screaming over each other as quickly as possible, my frustration increases because my focus is being pulled in 4 competing directions. Slowing it down was the right call, leaving its content to be more impactful.

So… after all that, would I recommend this movie to anybody? No. I don’t like any of the songs other than “Agony”, and the plot is convoluted and tedious. Snugboy wondered who the intended audience of this movie was, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who don’t like musicals. Like most movie adaptations, they’re trying to appeal to the largest group of people possible, and they took out a lot of the hokey stuff in an attempt to convince the more serious viewer of the film’s merit. It’s why we’ve gotten a gritty adaptation of Les Miserables, a Girl Boss version of Beauty and the Beast, and pleasureless rendition of Sweeney Todd. When adaptations fundamentally do not understand what makes the original show so revered, they’re bound to alienate its fans. While I wasn’t personally offended by this version of Into the Woods, it’s because I don’t understand what makes the source material so appealing. To me, the movie does a pretty good job of illustrating that selfish wishes may not make you happy, and if your actions in pursuit of your desires actively work against the greater good, or hurt the ones around you, they will ultimately backfire. However, to the fans of Into the Woods, I do know how annoyed I felt after watching Sweeney, and I sympathize with you.

Next week let’s continue to live in the magical, mystical world of parenting with Mary Poppins.