(courtesy IMP Awards)
While we all love to know more information about characters that have become near and dear to our hearts, we often have to be careful what we wish for, especially if the originating author is not part of the character augmentation that comes into play.
Especially if that originating author was one Roald Dahl, an imaginatively brilliant and supremely quirky, clever storyteller who had a gift for dreaming up people and premises that push the boundaries of make-believe and seamlessly brought to the sagely thoughtful and the outrageously out-there to immensely satisfying effect.
But while you could be forgiven for wondering if adding anything to the Dahl canon is a wise move, Wonka, directed by Paul King, who have us the transcendentally heartwarming and funny delights of Paddington 1 and Paddington 2 and who is producing the upcoming Paddington in Peru, definitively, playfully and soul-upliftingly proclaims that the idea is an inspired one.
From the word go when a hopefully excited Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet), carrying what seems to be the grief of his mother’s recent passing heavily on his sprightly frame, bursts forth into song on a ship into the harbour of an unnamed European city that seems to be heady mix of fin de siècle Paris, London and Berlin, we are treated to a film that fills in many of the how-did-get-here questions arising from the iconic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (book) and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (film) and does it with pizzazz, a robust sense of playful fun and songs so lively and addictive they’ll be bouncing around your head for days.
The film goes every bit as confidently and vivaciously as it starts with an exuberantly confident Wonka determined to parlay his twelve silver sovereigns into a fortune within a day, maybe two.
It’s unrealistically confident sure, but Chalamet makes it seems reasonable and wondrously possible, while grounding it all the attendant sadness and darkness that always seemed to hover in the background of Wonka and which often came to the fore, rounding out what could have been a fripperously light character with some real edge and dangerous substance.
That was always the mix that Dahl brought to any of his characters and it continues in Wonka which follows a tried-and-true, rags-to-riches hero’s journey seeded with an establishment versus plucky up-and-comer angle that’s realised with as much mischievous musicality as it is menace in the form of established and corrupt chocolate makers, Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Ficlegruber (Matthew Baynton) who are in league, rather amusingly with a corrupt cleric, played by Rowan Atkinson and 500 chocoholic monks.
King and fellow screenplay writer Simon Farnaby, also a Paddington alum, surround Wonka, whose dreams don’t play quite as planned at the hands of the conniving Mrs. Scubbit (Olivia Colman in luminously nasty form) and her would-be lover Bleacher (Tom Davis) with a beautifully supportive found family in the form of Noodle (Calah Lane), Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter) , Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher) and Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar) whom become central to Wonka delivering on his initial if now slightly bent out of shape optimism.
Also brought winningly and hugely amusingly into the mix is Hugh Grant as an Oompa-Loompa named Lofty whose attempts to sabotage Wonka, for reasons best left to the watching of the film, soon give way to something approaching grudging respect and the partnership that comes to characterise the life of Wonka in his chocolate factory days.
It’s a rich and enjoyable mix of characters, shaded light and dark just as Dahl would’ve done, and they are given a screenplay that dances and bounces and playfully leaps around in song and sparklingly light and frothy, and very funny, dialogue, that never forgoes some very grounded humanity simply for the sake of humanity.
In fact, much of the time while you’re laughing at a silly joke or a snappily wry oneliner, or the idea that all of Wonka’s chocolate-making milk has to come from a giraffe, you’re also aware of how dark Wonka’s life is and how the people who rule in the city would sooner him die (quite literally) than see any of his dreams come true in any form.
It’s this battle between good and evil, as old as storytelling itself, that gives Wonka so much emotional heft and substance, which it prosecutes with an eye on the fact that for all the visual technicolour and gloriously upbeat musical fun that it brings to its vibrantly dreamlike cityscape and the overall story itself, that the world of the film is also fraught and very dark in many ways.
Yes, you will wear a smile much of the time and watching the many choreographed sequences including one particularly quick but very funny scene where Wonka’s big song and sequence is all in his head (earning him quizzical looks from passers-by) will make your heart soar, but Wonka never takes its eye of the fact that bad people can be cruel, good people can have darker sides and that life is a gothic horrow show that takes no prisoners and hands out favours and fulfilled dreams with extreme reluctance.
This darker thread, very much a Dhal constant, serves the film superbly well, informing its overall narrative, characterisation, dialogue, and buoyantly melodic musical numbers and lending a film that gladdens and swells the heart and lifts the soul the necessary sage bleakness to make all the good moments, and there are many including a gloriously uplifting finale, feels blindingly and affectingly resonant.
Wonka is charmingly delightful proof positive that you can add to another creator’s brilliant legacy if you take the time to understand what powers it in the first place, and you take due care to bring together the light and dark of life in a musical melting pot that honours the source material, takes it to new and exciting places, and importantly has enormous fun with it because after all what is the point of anything if its doesn’t make you feel wonderfully and effervescently alive?