REVIEWED - CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: A new film of Roald Dahl's dark fable is a dolly mixture of good and bad, says Donald Clarke
THOUGH Roald Dahl possessed a near supernatural ability to connect with children, it often seemed as if he didn't care much for the little blighters. Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an infant, I was always struck by how many kids I knew similar to greedy Augustus Gloop, spoilt Veruca Salt or media-hungry Mike Teavee and how few I had encountered as sweet and kindly as Charlie. The hero of Dahl's book is the child we adults would all like to have; the other young sociopaths represent the offspring we suspect actually lurk in the nursery.
The great strength of Tim Burton's characteristically fitful new adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a Willy Wonka who appears to share Dahl's uneasy feelings towards children. Bolted firmly into a Louise Brooks bob, his skin the colour of boiled chicken, Johnny Depp fastidiously runs through every gesture of recoil known to man. Some have found shades of Michael Jackson in Depp's eerie performance, but this camp, prissy Willy Wonka would as soon attend a Rugby League match as invite Augustus to a sleepover.
Unlike Gene Wilder's Wonka, who seemed merely bored and disappointed by his less lovely guests, the latest chocolate magnate seems to take a delicious - just barely suppressed - glee in the misfortune the gluttonous bring upon themselves. He is in one sense more troubling than the Childcatcher, who at least had the decency not to charge for his sweets.
The picture takes place in a Dickensian nowhere where only the poor are truly virtuous. Charlie and his family - four bedridden grandparents, chirpy mom, resolute dad - live in a beautifully decrepit shack at the other end of the city from Willy Wonka's imposing factory.
Once, Grandpa Joe (played with delightful twinkliness by David Kelly) worked in the master confectioner's shop but, following infiltration by spies, Wonka - no friend of the unions, I'll bet - laid off all his staff and brought in the Oompa Loompas. Nobody has been inside the factory since. Suddenly Wonka announces a competition: five golden tickets, each allowing a day's entry to the building, will be placed randomly in bars of chocolate. Some cheat their way to the prizes. Charlie gets his fair and square.
So how does Willy Wonka's magic kingdom shape up? Pretty much as you'd expect, given Tim Burton's involvement. The bright, candy colours are counterbalanced by frequent disorienting images - a cow hanging from the ceiling, a gathering mass of angry squirrels - which, pulled from fevered dreams as they are, may unnerve some younger children.
Their parents will be even more troubled by how dull the Oompa Loompas have become. Played by a million versions of the estimable little person Deep Roy - star of Blakes 7 and Doctor Who - the busy workers are too cleverly conceptual to be properly charming. (We will parenthetically draw a veil over their execrably tuneless songs.) Elsewhere there is a lot of agreeable psychedelia and, outside the factory, in particular, some beautiful fairytale vistas.
But, despite all Burton's visual pomp, Charlie is most notable for its fine performances. Freddie Highmore, continuing the rapport he established with Depp in Finding Neverland, is winningly fragile as the hero. Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor, playing the boy's parents, manage to avoid being upstaged by their fine comedy teeth. And the doomed kids are all enjoyably beastly.
It adds up to a decent entertainment. But truth to tell, the film is not really good enough to justify Burton's making it. The only major addition to the book - and thus to the faithful 1971 adaptation - is a preposterous, voguish attempt to explain why Willy Wonka turned out the way he did. Naturally, this being a contemporary American film, it has to do with fathers and sons and all that baloney. How long will it be before Hollywood offers us the formative traumas of the Childcatcher?
