Like a lot of people, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to prefer the complexity of dark chocolate over the more basic sweetness of your standard milk chocolate. Which isn’t to say I won’t eat the milk chocolate, if it’s well made—I can forgive the lack of depth if there’s enough care put into the quality.
And to stretch my tortured metaphor a little further, this is a bit of what you get with Wonka, which tells the origin story of the famed candy maker, and which we expect is another cynical attempt at a movie studio wringing every last drop out of some intellectual property that will end up tasting like that garbage chocolate with foil around it that looks like Santa Claus that always seems to be lying around this time of year. And it may have all started that way, but when the people actually working on the chocolate—er, the movie, in this case—when they actually care to some degree about what they’re doing, we can end up with a pretty delightful surprise.
Wonka is directed by Paul King, who also made the Paddington movie, and, more importantly, also made Paddington 2, which turned out to be wildly popular and almost universally adored. And he brings a similar warmth to this film, which finds our Willy Wonka as a young man, coming off a boat nearly broke after travelling the world, and arriving in the city to begin his dream of running a chocolate shop. Alas, he runs into trouble with the city’s chocolate cabal, headed by his eventual nemesis Slugworth, and they intend to stop Wonka before he starts.
The movie has plenty of opportunities to go down a pretty dark road, but it thankfully avoids the trap of “grittiness” that so many retreads and origin stories insist on these days, and by and large, King disarms us with his characters’ sweetness, the movie’s bright colors, and the amiable songs everyone sings, even if none of those will stick in your ears. We’d be best off if we could imagine this Wonka world as a different one from Gene Wilder’s, because we won’t find that sense of danger or slight imbalance from Timothée Chalamet’s version, but this film does insist on reminding us this is the same Wonka, as it borrows musical cues from the 1971 film, and that bit of incongruity is to this film’s detriment.
Also, sadly, is Chalamet, although maybe calling him a detriment is too strong—he simply performs the task, and it often seems as if he’s playing at being the Wonka this movie wants rather than actually inhabiting him. We know he could have given us more depth, and we wonder why he hasn’t. The movie, too, is missing that depth, and especially in how it yadda-yaddas some major events that we just sort of have to go along with.
That said… it’s pretty easy to go along with. Wonka is an imperfect but kind of lovely little treat, whatever the origin story of the movie itself. It’s a good example of what can happen when people put a little love into what they’re making, no matter what that might be.
Wonka is in theaters December 15th.
