Willy Wonka, the kooky chocolatier from Road Dahl’s best-selling novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has been repackaged and sanitised to suit modern sensibilities. Paul King’s musical comedy Wonka stars Timothee Chalamet not as a a borderline deranged inventor but as a lateral-minded innovator whose business proposals might attract instant venture capital funding if they were shopped around in Silicon Valley.
King’s origin story draws on his Paddington films as well as musical fantasies set in wonderlands that resemble illustrated children’s books. These include the first adaptation of Dahl’s novel, starring Gene Wilder.
The new version, written by King and Simon Farnaby, is populated by identifiably British stereotypes with bad teeth, huffy-puffy manners and a nifty way with the English language. The clever writing, melodious musical numbers, and abundance of provocations for dentists and diabetologists combine for a full-course meal made up entirely of the desserts section.
Wonka – eager, big-hearted, guileless – is easily swindled by the odious Scrubbit (Olivia Colman) and Bleacher (Tom Davis) into servitude. With the help of the similarly entrapped Noodle (Calah Lane), Wonka plots liberation alongside world domination of Candyland.
Wonka’s confections, which rely on unusual ingredients as well as magic, rattle a cartel comprising Slugworth (Arthur Paterson), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton). They have been staving off the competition by bribing the police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) and the cleric (Rowan Atkinson) with regular supplies of chocolate.
The dark-toned edge in Dahl’s writing – which has given us some of the most memorable villains in children’s literature – has been melted into agreeable eccentricity. The visual effects and production design mesh seamlessly with the plot, rather than overwhelming Wonka’s journey to success.
A suite of perfectly pitched performances, led by a boyishly charming and infectiously earnest Timothee Chalamet, steers Wonka past a song too many and sight gags that could have been excised. Wonka is closer in tone to the first Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film than Tim Burton’s wicked adaptation from 2005. The tone is sweet without being saccharine, with equal attention paid to Noodle’s back story.
Yet, when a representative of the Oompa Looma tribe – the tiny-sized humans who supply Wonka with his cocoa beans – arrives as an orange-faced man with green hair and the contemptuous face of Hugh Grant, it’s a relief. If the film’s antagonists are nasty without being seriously scary, Grant’s Oompa Looma is decidedly outre.