By Jake Wilson
WONKA
Directed by Paul King
Written by Paul King and Simon Farnaby
116 minutes, rated PG
★★★½
He arrives at dawn by ship, gazing through the mist toward the new land where he plans to make his mark. He’s a young man but has years of study and adventure behind him, and his sights are already set on a particular dream: astonishing the world with the most remarkable, magical, scrumdiddlyumptious chocolates ever cooked up.
Timothee Chalamet soon establishes himself as the only possible casting choice.
Thus Paul King’s Wonka, the follow-up to his beloved Paddington films, isn’t an origin story in the most literal sense. True, the Wonka we meet at the outset, played by Timothee Chalamet, isn’t yet ruler of all he surveys, and noticeably lacks the demonic streak that defines most other versions of the character, who first appeared in Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .
All the same, he’s recognisably Willy Wonka from the word go, and Chalamet, a pixilated princeling with a mop of dark curls offsetting his china-doll complexion, establishes himself no less swiftly as the only possible casting choice.
Subsequent flashbacks trace Wonka’s obsession with chocolate to his longing for his dear departed mother (a cameo from King’s good-luck charm Sally Hawkins). But mostly the focus is less on his discovery of a vocation and more on what becomes of his innocence when faced with the corruption of the wider world.
The city he’s stepped into belongs to no particular place and time, but beyond the harbour mainly resembles 19th-century Paris (one of the main settings for Yorgos Lanthimos’ forthcoming Poor Things, an adults-only variation on some of the same themes).
It doesn’t take long for Wonka to be fleeced of his few sovereigns, then tricked into signing himself into indentured slavery by wicked hotelier Mrs Scrubbit (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis), who resemble the comic villains of Les Miserables as well as any number of Dahl grotesques.
Dispatched down the laundry chute, in shades of the later fate of Veruca Salt, Wonka befriends a group of underdogs who have been similarly entrapped, among them a young orphan known as Noodle (Calah Lane) who teaches him to read, with his prior education having been focused on chocolate all but exclusively.
These allies will come in handy when he goes up against a chocolate cartel that appears to have an iron grip on the city’s economy in general (Wonka makes no secret of his own business ambitions, but the anti-monopoly message is possibly slightly more credible in a movie distributed by Warner Bros than it would be from Disney).
In short, everything is just the way it was in all the old stories you half-remember being read as a child, although never quite exactly. King and co-writer Simon Farnaby mostly pull off the trick of balancing potentially gooey sentiment with winking self-awareness, a tone that shares less with Dahl than with Wallace and Gromit or classic episodes of The Simpsons.
Happily, one thing King commits to wholeheartedly is making Wonka a full-fledged musical, in the vein of Mel Stuart’s 1971 Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, to which it serves as a direct prequel. Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy was a good choice to write the songs, which resemble the sets in being constructed from familiar pop motifs but not bound to any particular era.
There are quibbles, of course. Hannon’s rhyme schemes aren’t quite neat enough for a finicky perfectionist like Wonka, and the plot doesn’t always have the logic even the most whimsical fantasy requires. Nor are the production numbers staged with anything like the fleetness of Steven Spielberg’s miraculous version of West Side Story: for all his determination to entertain, King isn’t that kind of wizard.
However, Wonka, like the Paddington films is something special in its own right, a labour of love from a team who have spared no expense or effort to give us all a Christmas treat. So come along one and all, bring the grandparents or the grandkids. Older viewers in particular should appreciate Chalamet’s skill at balancing youthful high spirits with hints of the melancholy lurking in the premise – that time will transform his open-hearted Wonka into someone less clearly lovable or knowable, the snarky genius behind the factory gates.
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