Industrial Waste

Wonka Vision: Awaiting chocolate enlightenment.

New factory, same problems.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

by Sam Adams

First, a word to those concerned that Tim Burton's remake sullies the original. If it's Mel Stuart's 1971 adaptation you're thinking of, you needn't worry that a classic has been desecrated: It isn't one. More beloved than be-watched, Stuart's version, which lets Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka steal the title as well as his scenes, looks positively threadbare today, its tacky, sick-colored sets evoking less a world of pure imagination than an overworked rec room. The snozzberries may taste like snozzberries, but they look like latex.

Burton's version, scripted by Big Fish's John August, returns a bit of Dahl's morbid glee, although the jokes about cannibalism and whipped cream that's whipped while it's still inside the cow are finessed in deference to touchier times. Burton made his name as a stylist of the toy macabre, and once, he and Dahl might have been a perfect fit. But as the years have gone by, Burton's visions have gotten larger without getting grander. Set inside an immense candy palace, Charlie would seem to call for Burton to pull out all the stops, but from the opening sequence, a dully digital affair in which chocolate bars parachute from the heavens, it's clear Burton has found a way to think big without actually thinking.

The children who find the golden tickets to enter the reclusive Wonka's factory come in shades of culturally determined brattiness: a gluttonous German, a bratty Brit and two belligerent Yanks. Then there's Charlie (Finding Neverland's Freddie Highmore), the working-class lad whose dad secures toothpaste caps for a living. Charlie's patient enthusiasm, born of years of privation, carries the day, suggesting that children ought to be well-behaved but let their minds run free.

Adults, however, need a little guidance, Johnny Depp included. Burton, however, has always been content to let Depp run wild, and the result, has been some of Depp's most outlandish, least affecting performances. Depp's Wonka, a powder-skinned, psychologically damaged hermit who wears rubber gloves and chokes on the word "parents," seems to have been conceived as Michael Jackson without the sleepovers. Unlike Wilder's dotty eccentric, he's a genuine freak, definitely not the kind you'd let your kid spend the day with. This may be, as Dahl fans argue, closer to the author's conception, but it also makes the time spent in Wonka's presence increasingly trying.

Charlie has a few notable ideas, namely that the Oompa Loompas, Wonka's tiny helpers, are played by digitally duplicated actor Deep Roy, and given horrid, clamorous songs to sing every time a child is whiskedaway. (The lyrics are Dahl's; the music is Danny Elfman's.) But it's only an illustrated book, one which, like the Harry Potter movies, evokes enough of its source to hint you're missing something great.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Directed by Tim Burton A Warner Bros. release Opens Friday at area theaters