Musicals are making a comeback. But more and more directors are discovering a harsh truth: they’re not as easy as they look. The latest director to learn this hard-knock lesson is Paul King, whose Wonka is brimming with whimsy and heart but never captures the joy of song. It is a musical that looks pretty yet feels stale.
King’s earlier works, Paddington and Paddington 2, have the heart and spirit of musicals but not the requisite number of song and dance numbers. Yet, Wonka lacks the bravado of his previous creations and feels more laborious than magical. It’s a cinematic curiosity because I would hardly call anything bad in Wonka per se, but nothing quite works, either.
Wonka is a prequel, but it doesn’t work too hard at it. We’re spared a lot of origin story tropes to focus on the meat of Willy Wonka (Timothy Chalmet) and his desire to blend magic with chocolate. King’s script focuses on a young Wonka who is naive to the way of the world; he doesn’t read the fine print at the hostel he stays at and becomes an indentured servant. It’s not entirely his fault; he can’t read.
The hostel is run by two Dickensian characters, Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and Mr. Bleacher (Tom Davis), the kind of people who would cheat a blind man and cackle about it afterward. The characters of Wonka are almost like Dick Tracy characters; their badness is evident at a glance. The more unscrupulous and greedy, the more exaggerated their appearance; however, those who are merely corrupt look normal but barely conceal their corruption, such as the Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key).
Poor Willy has difficulty getting started, not just because he’s being held prisoner in Miss Scrubbitt’s washroom. There’s also the Chocolate cartel with Ficklegruber (Matthew Baynton), Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), and Prodnose (Matt Lucas), who keep the prices of sweets inflated and hoard all the wealth of chocolate underneath the church. I’ll give King credit; his critique of late-stage capitalism is on point.
As baby’s first vivid takedown of the horrors of capitalistic greed, Wonka is a vivid portrait of how it erodes creativity and breeds despair. Part of how it does this is how it depicts how it can put people in a never-ending prison of debt. Willy’s other companions in Miss Scribitt’s washroom are the kindly old accountant Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), a plumber, Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar), who used to work as a switchboard operator, failed comedian Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher), and little orphan Noodle (Calah Lane). Working-class people with lousy luck needed a place to stay and found themselves overcharged and bound by hidden fees.
The messaging is all well and good, but I couldn’t quite shake the almost Seussian nature of Wonka. The names and way the characters spoke felt less like Roald Dahl and more like Dr. Seuss. It is a minor quibble, but King purposefully avoids the darkness of Dahl’s book and his characters. Despite all plot mechanics, Wonka lacks stakes, leaving the story feeling too airy. It’s less transportive and more produced.
Then there’s the conundrum of Chalamet’s Willy Wonka. Chalamet is a lead who plays Wonka like a beige-painted wall. There’s never a hint of real impishness or an underlying sense of unpredictability. He lacks any mystery, his fresh-scrubbed open face telling us too much or worse, showing us how little is happening behind the eyes.
But luckily, Chalamet spends most of the movie opposite Lane’s Noodle, and if there’s a saving grace in Wonka, it’s her. She lights up the screen and exposes Chalamet’s rather thinly played Wonka. Her Noodle has the same grit and gumption as Wonka but a better head on her shoulders and a more interesting backstory. I spent much of Wonka wishing the movie was about Noodle and less about Willy Wonka.
It doesn’t help that Chung-hoon’s camera captures the lovely production design but fails to find a way to make the song and dance numbers feel lively. King and Chung never quite overcome the feeling of being constrained by the musical numbers instead of being freed by them. Wonka sporadically comes alive when it’s less a musical and more of a fantastical dream. Wonka and Noodle dancing across the moonlit skylight pulled me in before losing me as it returned to its all wheezy and too-clever script.
Gone is the visual waltz of the Paddington movies, replaced with a kind of static confectionary storytelling. Chung’s camera never feels acrobatic instead comes off almost lethargic. The colors pop, but there’s no life to them. Wonka looks good, but there’s no imagination on display, no vivacity of spirit of any kind.
Hugh Grant, as Lofty the Oompa Loompa, steals chocolate from Wonka, which is another incident where Wonka loses its rhythm. The idea is nifty, seeing as Wonka stole the chocolate from the Oompa-Loompas, and they are trying to get it back. It’s an excellent little commentary on colonialism and exploitation, but Grant as Lofty isn’t a character; he’s Hugh Grant as an Oompa-Loompa. The CGI used to make him into the fantastical orange creature is seamless, but the filmmakers forgot the words of Ian Malcolm: They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.
King’s Wonka is never boring. But is that what we want from a movie about the origin of Willy Wonka? It would seem to go against the very conceit of the film to settle for reality when the potentiality of the dream is so much more moving and the possibilities of something more so much more rewarding rather than being happy with the status quo. Sadly, Wonka never achieves that potential.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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