 | Charlie & The Chocolate Factory Director: Tim Burton Rating: PG Now showing What is it with Tim Burton and parental issues? His last film, the wonderful 'Big Fish', was a feature-long meditation on a man tortured by his relationship with his estranged father. Now, in the second film version of Roald Dahl's classic children's book, we have Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) tortured by his relationship with his estranged father (played with suitable gravitas by Christopher Lee, playing what has to be the world's most terrifying dentist). It's a strange addition and one of the few things made up for the film, which is otherwise a far more faithful adaptation than the Gene Wilder vehicle from 1971. I'm going to assume that everyone on earth is at least vaguely familiar with the story, so we'll dispense with the plot for the time being and focus on the performances - which are uniformly excellent. Freddie Highmore is perfect as everychild Charlie Bucket, David Kelly is great as Grandpa Joe, and the supporting cast is bang on throughout, from Helena Bonham-Carter and Noah Taylor as Charlie's parents to the four child actors who play Veruca Salt (Julia Winter), Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry), Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) and Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb) - and watch out for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from dog-walking fops Mark Heap and Kevin Eldon, best known for their work on the brilliant UK sketch comedy show 'Big Train'. However, the entire film hinges on Depp's performance as Wonka. He brings a layer of creepiness to the role that's present in spades in the book, but was largely absent in Wilder's performance in the first film. Depp's Wonka has a detached impishness that's downright sinister at times, as befits the role; however, the otherworldly, slightly mystical child-man aspects are somewhat undermined by the whole motivational issues-with-his-dad subplot. You don't want psychological reality from Willy Wonka. After all, we don't bother trying to explain why the Buckets are living in a decrepit shanty that any city council would have bulldozed in a second, so surely we don't need to give Wonka some extraneous motivation to succeed in the candy game. Anyway, there are two things you can pretty much guarantee from a Burton film: firstly, that the production design will look great (the sets are amazing, elements like the Great Glass Elevator look exactly as you'd imagined it, and the decision to have the millions of Oompa Loompas played by one man - British-Indian actor Deep Roy - was a stroke of genius), and secondly, that the score will be by Danny Elfman (and the former Oingo Boingo frontman does his usual excellent job, also providing the singing voices for the Oompa Loompas). There are also a few nice nods to previous Burton films that I look forward to re-checking on DVD: were those kids really dressed as Lock, Shock and Barrel for Halloween - and were those Jack Skellington chocolates? I can't help thinking that it's perhaps a little too frenetic and (at times) scary for a children's audience, and I'd feel slightly better about this film if it'd dispensed with the whole Wonka Senior subplot, but it's still one of the better book-to-film adaptations out there.  | |
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