Willy Wonka remake better than original

By David Germain
The Associated Press

From The Greenville News 07.15.05

A big studio film that really works. A remake that improves on the original.

Hollywood is truly in fantasy land with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Tim Burton's wildly imaginative take on Roald Dahl's beloved children's book.

This is the sort of visual feast Burton was born to make. It's a film packed with chaste delights for young children and plenty of sophisticated, cryptic edge to entertain and puzzle their parents.

Then there's Johnny Depp. As candy man Willy Wonka, Depp puts such a distinct, strange, wondrous and sometimes creepy stamp on this social misfit, Gene Wilder's portrayal in the 1971 original almost looks like a button-down 9-to-5 Nestle's exec by comparison.

Just as Depp hoisted "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" from a pleasntly dopey action comedy to an Academy Award-level performance piece, he elevates this elegantly simple tale into Burton's most human film since their collaborations on "Ed Wood" and "Edward Scissorhands."

In this era of mediocre to atrocious remakes, parents who grew up enamored of Wilder's "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" should be justly dubious. But Wilder's version wasn't all that hot, suffering from hokey songs and sometimes cheesy production values, while its occasional psychedelic flashes, corny back then, now make the movie seem like a quaint relic.

Like other Burton fantasies, his version feels timeless, Depp's disturbing similarities to Michael Jackson not withstanding. It's hard to imagine anyone looking back on the movie 30 years from now and finding its visual panache chintzy, while the fairytale texture of both the chocolate factory and the real world surrounding it root the entire movie in dreamland.

The difference between the two movies is apparent from the opening credits, both featuring candy in mass production. "Willy Wonka" features conventional machinery spitting out chocolate; "Charlie" has a pure flight-of-fancy assembly line in which balloons lovingly waft each chocolate bar to the wrapping area.

Wonka, a recluse who closed his factory gates 15 years ago, sets the world in a tizzy when he announches that five golden tickets will be wrapped inside his chocolate bars, earning the finders a lifetime supply of candy and a tour of the plant.

The winners are four odious brats and good-hearted Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore, Depp's "Finding Neverland" co-star), an impoverished boy who lives with his parents (Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor) and both sets of grandparents in an impossibly crooked house.

Charlie and his Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) join the tour, a progression of hilarious comeuppances for his four co-winners and their equally repugnant parents.