An insouciant girl named Violet sticks a wad of gum in her mouth. Her skin turns azure with each bite, nearly earning her namesake. She starts to inflate, barely even able to waddle. To move she must roll. Poor Violet has become a blueberry—all because she, in trying to sate her curiosity, failed to heed the warnings of the candymaker named Willy Wonka.
This sequence may be one of the most indelible scenes from Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). The film, an adaptation of the 1964 Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, offered a captivating fantasia of weirdness, tangling horror and humor so distinctly (and using food to accomplish that) that it became a fixed part of America’s cultural firmament. Its moralistic overlay—a child who steps out of bounds is punished, while one who follows orders will reap the rewards of good behavior—also made it catnip for parental embrace.
Retelling the story of this wily chocolatier might seem a daunting task. When Tim Burton brought his characteristically twisted sensibility to his 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the commercial success of that film indicated that this story had enough power to keep provoking wonderment. (Despite the grousing of some, like the star of the 1971 film, Gene Wilder, who bemoaned that effort as a mere cash grab.) To put Willy Wonka’s tale to film yet again then is to ask for trouble; how to expand the limits of a gastronomical world that is already so imaginative?
With his new musical film Wonka, director Paul King (Paddington, Paddington 2) diverges from the more macabre tone of those prior cinematic treatments of Wonka, delivering a peppy, spirited prequel. Its universe is a Technicolor carnival thanks to the detail in its sets and costumes, its spectacle akin to that of the rest of the Wonka dynasty. But King does not rest lazily on nostalgia; he suffuses a familiar narrative with fresh flavor.
Wonka begins as the titular protagonist (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in the big city from a small town (the precise locations of the film’s events are vague) with chump change in his pocket, eager to make his mark. His few fortunes dwindle quickly on his first day. But he’s equipped with a knack for making chocolate, a talent inherited from his late mother (Sally Hawkins), a gifted chocolatier whose legacy he seeks to extend. (This contradicts the backstory in Burton’s film, where Wonka’s strained relationship with his own father, a dentist, explains his brambly and unpleasant demeanor.) Before dying, she left him a chocolate bar of her own making, which Wonka carries with him as both a talisman of this loss and a reminder of his artistic purpose.
Desperation for lodging lures him to Scrubitt and Bleacher, a laundromat run by a pair of malfeasants (Olivia Colman and Tom Davis). They cajole him to sign a contract with fine print that Wonka, who is illiterate, cannot read (flipping the first film, in which an older Wonka dupes unsuspecting children with an analogous trick). That illegible text ends up burying him under debt he can only pay off by toiling in the basement with others who also fell prey to Scrubitt and Bleacher’s machinations. Down the chute Wonka goes, entombed in the steam and starch of the laundry—until he hatches an escape plan and breaks out with one of his fellow exiles, an orphaned girl named Noodle (Calah Lane).
Wonka is determined to improve his lot in life with the power of his chocolate—reminiscent of his great promise years later to Charlie, an impoverished boy whom Wonka chooses as the heir to his factory. His are no ordinary confections; he uses the milk of giraffes, not that of mere cows, to make his chocolates. He sources his ingredients from every imaginable corner of the globe: At one point he sings of “ground vanilla from the markets of Manila” he braids into his chocolates, while in another scene he references the tears of a Russian clown as a choice ingredient. These treats are also aesthetic wonders—one of his chocolates resembles a pendant, coated in turquoise and topped with a glossy thunderbolt-shaped jewel—and they occasionally even possess the properties of elixirs. Some even make people levitate.
But Wonka soon meets another landmine. Chocolate Cartel, run by three men who have a monopoly on chocolate making in the city, perceives Wonka as an adversary. The villains imbue their roles with quirky specificity; one member (Matthew Baynton) retches when he hears the word poor, so disdainful he is of the lower classes.
Running just under two hours, Wonka offers the rich and kaleidoscopic aesthetics that marked its two cinematic predecessors. Its visual effects are a conceptual marvel and watching them feels akin to stepping inside a theme park. Wonka also preserves those classic elements of body horror like Violet’s blueberry inflation: One especially notable scene involves Wonka’s customers growing facial hair that resembles cotton candy, the result of accidental poisoning via yeti sweat.
The film’s most unique invention might be Wonka himself, charmingly played by Chalamet. The actor brings a gentle quality to the character that hasn’t quite been shown before. In 1971 Gene Wilder’s masterful portrait of whimsy was edged with menace, and Johnny Depp’s prickly, tensile approach had him deliver lines like sarcastic japes. Aside from the occasional glint of mischief in his eyes, Chalamet lacks that disquieting tartness so many have associated with Wonka. There is little in Chalamet’s rendition to suggest that he could snap at one gesture of delinquency from a child touring his factory. Chalamet’s Wonka doesn’t terrorize kids; in fact, based on his friendship with Noodle, he seems to adore them.
Some might see this softening as a deliberate, and unwelcome, sanitization of a morally ambiguous character, bleaching him of complication. But Chalamet’s depiction is cheery without feeling toothless. He embodies Dahl's original conception of the character, one who “kept making quick jerky little movements with his head, cocking it this way and that, and taking everything in with those bright twinkling eyes,” as the source text reads. He offers his own eccentricity and kooky earnestness while also possessing the gravitas to make Wonka’s attempts at greater emotion resonate, such as those aforementioned scenes involving his mother, or those opposite Noodle, who is also aching for parental connection.
Yet King retains some of the bite of earlier Wonka films. Most notable of all might be Hugh Grant, who plays a curmudgeonly carrot-skinned Oompa Loompa. A Lilliputian creature, he has come to seek revenge upon Wonka for pilfering a key chocolate ingredient from the island home of the Oompa Loompas (some might even draw a parallel to chocolate exploitation as it operates in the real world) but he turns into an unexpected ally for Wonka. Grant’s character arrives just as Wonka begins to flirt with the saccharine, and his acidity, recalling the previous films’ notes of cynicism, balances the proceedings.
Grant’s character—who sings a variation of the very song immortalized in the 1971 film—epitomizes what makes Wonka praiseworthy: He both pays tribute to the memetic essence of Dahl’s source text while providing an interpretation that suits King’s otherwise sunny directorial vision. Wonka walks a delicate tightrope successfully, becoming an object that both stirs nostalgia while serving novel pleasures. And although Wonka’s trappings are unabashedly sentimental, its sweetness is spun with such narrative and formal guile that it does not cloy. That may be Wonka’s finest coup: It doesn’t try to condescendingly satisfy an audience yearning for a taste of the past—and, in doing so, it makes a pure-hearted entry to the Wonka canon.
Wonka’s candied exuberance might seem suited to this cultural moment, when audiences may want to be soothed rather than challenged at the movies, when excess and maximalism have become an increasingly dominant mode of consumption, when the grim ills of chocolate labor and production are frequently ignored. King’s film, though, succeeds on its own terms: He’s made a movie for kids, working within his cramped constraints of existing intellectual property to simply create something fun.
“Back when I was your age, I wanted to be a magician,” Chalamet’s Wonka confesses to young Noodle in one scene, opening up a chocolate-making contraption that resembles a makeup chest. This declaration of intent sounds sincere, not sinister. When he asks her to try some chocolate made from condensed thunderclouds and liquid sunlight, it seems like an invitation, not a threat with ulterior motives that previous versions of the candymaker might have had. You believe what he’s trying to sell you, and he does, too.