Spoilers Ahoy

That director Tim Burton’s adaptation of delightful misanthrope Roald Dahl’s Charlie & The Choclate Factory is marginally more faithful to its source material than was Mel Stuart’s 1971 version, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, is ultimately of no consequence whatsoever, since the film, while something of an improvement over Stuart’s even beyond its adherence to Dahl’s story, is scarcely any good in its own right. In hindsight, the film draws its closest parallel to Dahl’s work in the way it builds a false sense of security. Dahl disguised his subversive, scathing indictments of modern parenting as magical-realist children’s fantasy, making his novel all the more potent and surprising. Burton disguises his overly sentimental, populist uplift treacle as a film that, for its first hour or so, gives the impression that it might actually match Dahl’s mean streak, only to fall apart entirely by the end.

As is the case for all of Burton’s films, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is worth seeing once for its phenomenal art direction. That this film, in particular, should qualify as “eye candy” of the sweetest sort attempts to mask many of its greater shortcomings. From its opening sequence, wherein one of his trademark Rube Goldberg contraptions (done better in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands) pours, cools, cuts, wraps, boxes, and labels several crates of Willy Wonka’s chocolate, Burton creates an insular world that is both fanciful and somehow recognizable. The rows upon rows of tenement houses that surround Wonka’s ginormous factory are effectively austere, a deliberate throwback to Victorian England, though the film is ostensibly set in the present. And, once the film moves its action to the interior of the titular chocolate factory, Burton’s cockeyed take on surrealism builds a world that, if not quite a world of pure imagination, adheres to its own gleeful illogic. It’s more the pity that the story that plays out on these spectacular sets is so empty.

In the film’s briskly-paced first act, Burton introduces Charlie Bucket (Finding Neverland’s Freddie Highmore, permanently typecast as the saddest-eyed little moppet you ever did see), a child with apparent ambitions on sainthood given the selflessness of his every action and word over the course of the film, and his impoverished family— his mother (inevitably, Helena Bonham Carter, wearing fake teeth); his father (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’s Noah Taylor), who finds himself pink-slipped from his job of screwing the caps onto tubes of toothpaste; Grandmas Josephine (Eileen Essel) and Georgina (Liz Smith, but not the gossip columnist), who speak only when Burton feels the need to insert some atonal comic relief; Grandpa George (David Morris), villainized for his thematically appropriate pessimism; and Grandpa Joe (David Kelly), who has an inconsequential backstory as a former Wonka employee. The seven Buckets live in a one-room shack that, in threatening to topple over at any moment, appears wonderfully at odds with the perfectly aligned tenements around it.

When Wonka announces his extraordinary contest— he’s hidden five golden tickets inside millions of bars of chocolate, distributed all over the world, though the geography of the contest’s results suggest otherwise— the family emphasizes to Charlie that he shouldn’t hope to win, since he receives just one bar of Wonka’s chocolate per year, as his birthday present. The Buckets watch the results of the contest on television, passing less-than-kind judgment on the four monstrous— and monstrously underdeveloped— children who find the first golden tickets. Since Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is the kind of didactic morality play that has to have a pure-of-heart hero, though, Charlie eventually finds some money on the street and runs to a nearby candy shop to purchase a third Wonka bar, having failed to uncover a golden ticket either on his birthday or when Grandpa Joe gave him a long stored-away quarter to purchase a second bar, and he does find his ticket into Wonka’s factory, setting into motion the bulk of the film’s action.

The most inspired moment in the film occurs as Charlie, Grandpa Joe, and the four other winning children and their parents first enter Wonka’s factory, greeted by an It’s a Small World style puppet revue that’s grotesque even before the puppets catch fire and melt, singing their chipper song of Willy Wonka’s genius all the while. It’s macabre and exhilarating without being cruel, and were the entire film given such foresight, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory may well have been a classic children’s entertainment like The Incredibles or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Instead, the demise of the puppets is the last moment of hope for Charlie & The Chocolate Factory.

As the children watch the puppets burn, Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) himself materializes out of thin air to enjoy the spectacle with them, and the film is never again about anything beyond Depp’s performance as Wonka. Perhaps the most interesting point of comparison between Stuart’s 1971 film and Burton’s is in their titles— while Stuart gave Willy Wonka top-billing but spent plenty of time developing his supporting players, Burton puts Charlie’s name in the title but puts on what is essentially an all-Wonka show. Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is the fourth collaboration between Burton and Depp (following Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Sleepy Hollow), and while Wonka certainly qualifies as one of their impossibly odd outsider heroes, it’s the first such collaboration wherein Depp’s performance isn’t in service to the film itself. Depp’s turn as Wonka exists in a vacuum, entirely independent of the film around it. It’s an endlessly watchable, engaging performance that’s neither better nor worse than any of Depp’s other recent performances, but it seems as though he showed up on set and said, "Okay, I’m going to make some weird, exaggerated faces, and if you want to have something going on around me, that’s great. If not, that works, too." The film eventually reduces to Depp’s performance. And, like the art direction, the performance makes the film worth seeing, but reading any more into it— if you’re looking for a Michael Jackson analog, Master Hayao Miyazaki’s also not-good Howl’s Moving Castle provides a better one— accomplishes precious little.

And it’s in Burton’s attempts to give Wonka a greater depth of character than Depp already provides that the film goes horribly, irrevocably awry. Whenever one of his guests mentions the word “parents” or asks him a loaded question about his childhood, Wonka lapses into ill-conceived flashbacks to his father (Christopher Lee, perfectly cast in a role that shouldn't exist in the film), a puritanical dentist who not only forbade his son from eating candy but who also allowed his son to go trick-or-treating on Halloween so that he could explain to his son in detail the dangers of each type of candy he brought home before throwing said candy into the fireplace. It’s simpleminded, run-of-the-mill pop psychology, in other words, and there isn’t enough substance to the remainder of the film to overcome it. Depp’s leering crazy-eyes try to suggest something uniquely pathological about Wonka, but Burton and screenwriter John August (who also wrote Burton’s adaptation of Big Fish) insist that, no, dad’s emotional unavailability is to blame.

Which would be bad enough in its own right, if not for the film’s excruciating final act, wherein Charlie teaches the man-child Wonka about the importance of family and berates Wonka into reconciling with his father. Wonka promised Charlie that he would give him the greatest gift in all the world: his chocolate factory. But, instead, it’s Charlie who gives Wonka the greater prize: forgiveness. Again, Popes have accomplished less than young Charlie Bucket.

This is not to say, of course, that there isn’t value in the capacity to forgive or that the family unit isn’t important. The problem is that it’s the wrong position for Charlie & The Chocolate Factory to take in its final twenty minutes, based on the thematic undertones of what’s preceded it. It’s a cowardly move, and it’s an especially disconcerting move to see Burton make. Burton, after all, is the director who denied his modern fairy-tale, Edward Scissorhands, of a happy ending and, in perhaps his most singly subversive moment, had the headless horseman go back into a house to decapitate a toddler who’d taken refuge under the floorboards. That Tim Burton would give Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, a tale of unparalleled menace, a “happy ending,” even after suggesting that its menace was all methodically, intentionally plotted, is a cop-out.

Even Stuart’s adaptation retained an ambiguity to a crucial plot point. Once the four children-as-cautionary-tales have been dispatched, they aren’t seen again in his film, leaving intact the very real possibility that they’d been killed. In Burton’s film, there’s a scene in which the four terrible, punished children are seen leaving the factory, with their parents having learned some important lessons about setting boundaries.

As for those four children, they’re another of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory’s glaring weaknesses. Sure, they’re meant to be read as little more than deadly sins, but the extent of their wickedness goes largely uncommented upon and their punishments do not really fit their crimes. The only moment of genuine horror in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, in fact, is in the exit of Veruca Salt (Julia Winter, doing well with the material given to her). Characterized as a child spoiled beyond suspension of disbelief— stupidly, while waiting for Wonka to open the gates to the factory, she’s made to tell her father (Tom Wilkinson look-alike James Fox), “Make time go faster”— Veruca attempts to capture one of Wonka’s specially-trained squirrels, who shell walnuts in what is perhaps the most visually arresting room in the factory, only to have the squirrels attack her en masse. The squirrels pin her to the ground as she screams for her father to save her, only to have one of the squirrels tap her on the forehead to verify that she deserves her fate, which finds her left, quite literally, for garbage.

In short, it’s filmed exactly like a gang rape, so it’s impossible to feel any sort of cathartic release at the moment of her comeuppance and dangerous, even, to wonder exactly what lesson is to be learned from Veruca Salt’s tale.

The other children fare slightly better. Only glutton Augustus Gloop (Philip Weigratz, barely in the film) is left with a punishment that follows a consistent logic— exiting the factory, he’s faced with the perhaps too-easy temptation of a body that tastes like the delicious chocolate on which he’s gorged himself. Having been transformed briefly into a giant blueberry, the hypercompetitive Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb, proving with a definitive kind of horror that Dakota Fannings are actually grown in a lab) is left with blue skin that is more upsetting to her mother (Dodgeball’s Missi Pyle, giving a more fully-realized, if lunatic, performance than perhaps anyone in the film). And punkass Mike Teavee (the entirely too hostile Jordan Fry), the subject of Wonka’s most open contempt— Wonka repeatedly and hilariously reprimands Mike for mumbling, which is the least offensive aspect of his aggressive speech— ends up stretched-out to inhuman proportions that would only make it easier to exert his antisocial tendencies.

And, for all the hoo-ha made over bad parenting over the course of the film, Wonka’s paternalistic relationship to his workers, the Oompa Loompas (Deep Roy, digitally replicated a thousand times over), whom he “rescued” from their native soil and customs to pay them in the cocoa beans that they just adorably worship and to delight at their choreographed song and dance numbers, is not addressed. The Oompa Loompas’ songs, composed by Danny Elfman, range from an inspired 60’s psychedelia number to a lame Esther Williams water ballet, a lame hair-metal video, and a lame imitation of Devo, but Wonka marvels at them all with equal zeal. Still, if Charlie & The Chocolate Factory makes anything clear, it’s that the Oompa Loompas desperately need to unionize.

So, what with the casual racism and the threat of sexual violence, the only real malice in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is of the unintentional variety, allowing Burton to have his sickly-sweet happy ending in a way that appears to tie up any loose ends and making for a film of no real consequence. The aftertaste troubles only for what Charlie & The Chocolate Factory means, particularly as the follow-up to the equally gauzy Big Fish, within the scope of Burton’s career.

“It’s candy. It doesn’t have to have a point,” Charlie says at one point in response to one of Mike Teavee’s snarky outbursts, and, while there’s always something to be said for pure escapism— and Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean qualifies as such— it shouldn’t be asking or expecting too much for even an ultimately pointless confection like Charlie & The Chocolate Factory to be well-made and respectful of its audience and its own medium. Instead, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is a hollow core beneath some unintended nastiness, tooth-rotting bathos, and a shiny and entirely unfulfilling candy coating.

Recommended: No