'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'

BY JAN STUART | STAFF WRITER

July 15, 2005

Just what exactly are Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton doing to Willy Wonka, the childishly imperious, self-aggrandizing candy manufacturer of Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"?

You would have to have been raised in captivity not to get the inferences in Depp's powder-white face and pixilated demeanor: It's as if Michael Jackson had been reimagined as a lady-in-waiting in the nursery of Louis XV.

But what are we to make of the Anna Wintour haircut? The bug-eyed, Carol Channing sunglasses? The chirpy delivery and clipped chortle that would indicate we have finally located the long lost love child of Carol Burnett and Pee-Wee Herman?

Forget ex-Wonka Gene Wilder. Forget all those toffee-sweet songs about some huggy-bear guy who mixes things with love and makes the world taste good. This Willy Wonka is a Frankenstein monster of arrested development and unresolved childhood conflicts that have been maniacally funneled into Wonkaland, a child's totalitarian fantasy in the elaborate disguise of a candy factory.

No accident, then, that Wonka's dentist father is played by Christopher Lee, that veteran Frankenstein monster and Dracula of yore. Wonkaland may remind you of Munchkinland, with its greener-than-nausea foliage and its happy little Oompa Loompas bursting into song. But Tim Burton's flamboyantly sinister "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is more like the small-fry version of all those Lee-heyday horror flicks in which a band of people stuck in an old house for a night get picked off one by one.

The victims of Dahl and Burton's imagination are primarily victims of bad parenting, a quartet of breathtakingly obnoxious children who have nabbed four of five contest coupons entitling the winners to a day at the Wonka factory, hosted by the reclusive man himself.

The fifth winner is an aberration, a poor English boy named Charlie (ingratiating Freddie Highmore of "Finding Neverland") who puts the needs of his family ahead of his own.

John August's puckish screenplay begins like a page out of "A Christmas Carol," peeking into the romantically ramshackle house that Charlie shares with four grandparents, an unemployed father and a cabbage-chopping mother. But the ferocious credit sequence that precedes it - a "Metropolis"-redolent flurry of churning candy machines - prepares us for the mayhem that ensues once Charlie's satanic fellow winners are let loose in Wonkaland and get their just deserts one after another.

This is Burton in the winking mode and full-tilt visual extravagance of his three best movies: "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," "Edward Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood." The youngest audience members will miss the layering of pop culture references upon which Willy has built his madhouse (as if time had stood still the moment he shut the gate on the outside world): Sgt. Pepper, the Bee Gees, "Ben-Hur," "THX 1138," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Busby Berkeley-style production numbers for the Oompa-Loompas (written by Burton die-hard Danny Elfman) that remind us how fascistic those synchronized routines could be.

Depp, who is to Tim Burton what James Stewart was to Alfred Hitchcock, misses the mark when the script requires him to shtick it up a la Jerry Lewis. But he puts his head on the block in ways most of his contemporaries wouldn't dare, and ultimately overrides the camp posturings of the flashback sequences (Joan Crawford, anyone?) to make us feel something for Willy's inner child.

The cast's real heroes are the ubiquitous Deep Roy, playing the entire population of Oompa-Loompas, and the irresistibly affable David Kelly. As Charlie's Grandpa Joe, Kelly makes the most convincing argument yet for housing a family dynasty under the same roof, even if it means all four in-laws have to pile into one bed.