It's not quite dark chocolate

In this 'Factory,' there isn't the bitter taste you might expect

BY JOHN ANDERSON | John Anderson is a regular contributor to Newsday.

July 15, 2005

Johnny Depp stars as Willy Wonka in the new movie "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." (AP Photo/Warner Bros. Pictures/Peter Mountain)

Far away, on a tiny street in Amsterdam, is a shop called Puccini that produces chocolates in all manner of eccentric flavors - tamarind, tea, lemongrass, black pepper. The intention, one guesses, is to make chocolate more interesting for a certain type of adult, other types - and children - having found chocolate infinitely fascinating, in and of itself.

The difference in the two palates is the difference between those who find English author Roald Dahl delightful or creepy; as effervescent as an egg cream, or as nasty as prescription cough syrup. The children's writer, who died in 1990, was not, by any accounts, an ideal human. Which doesn't mean he wasn't an ideal scribe for kids.

The Dahl Dilemma

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the latest effort to translate Dahl to the big screen (others include "The Witches," "James and the Giant Peach" and the original "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"), opens today and has walked into what might be called the Dahl Dilemma. The author, says Margaret Talbot in a recent New Yorker article, is "a children's writer whom many adults over the years have disliked or distrusted, though they have not always found it easy to say why." Sometimes, the objections have involved lack of depth; others, a view of Dahl as pathologically twisted.

But as screenwriter John August sees it, the Dahl book on which he based the new movie's script "is much less dark than 'Harry Potter,' for instance. Harry is in mortal danger at the end of every story. There's much more intentional cruelty in those books. Adults misremember what it's like to be a kid, and the stories that were read to them - Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother was eaten, for example."

It is, of course, entirely feasible that the darker edges of Dahl, like those of Harry Potter, are precisely what attracts their younger audiences. Or, like "Huckleberry Finn," Dahl's tale can be read on any number of levels, beginning as a child's fable and ending as something bit more ominous.

A more eccentric Depp

"Charlie," directed by the oft-outrageous Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp in what will undoubtedly be cited as one of the more eccentric performances in an eccentric career, accepts Dahl like a fat bar of Scharfenberger, on face value, as a moral fable, not a mirror of adult anxiety and Freudian boogaboogah.

"We thought that a lot of things might go over very young kids' heads," said Richard D. Zanuck, the film's producer. "But that didn't deter us in any way, nor did we design it that way. Kids are seeing the innocent side of it and aren't mature enough to read in the darker innuendo that's always there."

The film with which so many are familiar - Michael Ritchie's "Willie Wonka" (1971) - actually seems darker than Burton's. Gene Wilder's Willie Wonka was mysterious, more hysterical and possessing seemingly more sinister motives - thus stranger and more monstrous.

For all his parallels to Michael Jackson (someone so reclusive he's become socially handicapped, said August), Burton's Willy Wonka is easier to understand, more sympathetic, more human.

In "Charlie," the virtuous but poverty-stricken Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) finds one of the coveted Golden Tickets, allowing him access to the mysterious factory of arch-chocolatier Willy Wonka. There, he joins four repulsive members of his peer group on a misguided tour where weird things happen - and the greedy, gluttonous and grasping get their comeuppance.

It isn't a particularly dark story, actually - good and bad are clearly defined, and good triumphs. "If you want to find a message," said Zanuck, "it's that spoiled brats, and the spoiled parents who create them, are the losers. And that modest, humble Charlie gets the prize. It's pretty obvious, actually."

And the time is ripe for this? "I think yes," he said. "A lot of parents are politically correct to the extent that they let their children get away with too much, and sometimes the child is the boss and they don't want to parent. ... That's the way things are today, but apparently in Roald Dahl's time, too."

Many of the changes between the book and the earlier film, Zanuck said, involved what movie technology was capable of. "Also, they killed off Charlie's father, so he would be more of the classic orphan character, who needed a father figure, and a family. In our film, it's Willy Wonka who needs the family.

"I like to say that Charlie's superpower is his family," August said. "He has four grandparents and two parents who really love him. And he isn't rewarded for any deed or any talent. He's rewarded just for being good."