Wonka is the movie I was hoping
The Archies would be—fantastical, innovative, clever, big-hearted, brimming to the full with magical iridescence, an aching wistfulness, and bolstered by a brilliant cast.
For as long as the Zoya Akhtar film played, I desperately wanted someone in the movie to open up a window or two and let some fresh air in. Everything was so stilted and overdone, I felt claustrophobic. Paul King’s Wonka, meanwhile, is a wild, whimsical ride into the open, so satisfying that it almost makes you levitate, much like a taste of one of Willy Wonka’s hoverchoc, a chocolate that looks like an egg, has a bug inside, and sets you off the ground.
The origin story of the genius chocolatier, Wonka is a prequel to Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. After years at sea looking for obscure, mystical ingredients for his disruptive confectionary that he believes would change the world and help him reunite with his mother, a young Willy (Timothée Chalamet) arrives at a burgeoning European metropolis. With 12 silver sovereigns and a hat full of dreams, he hopes to open up a chocolate shop at Galleries Gourmet, the city’s bustling, ornate marketplace. But as fate would have it, his neat plan doesn’t quite pan out as linearly.
The first night he lands himself in a launderette run by Mrs Scrubbit (a deliciously malicious Olivia Colman) with the help of Bleacher (Tom Davis), her grubby henchman who later doubles as her silken kimono-wearing lover. The two entice innocuous travellers looking for cheap lodging and make them sign a dubious contract that turns them into bonded labour. Willy walks straight into the trap and meets a motley group of inmates, including a young orphan named Noodle (a scene-stealing Calah Lane). The two find friendship and a feeling of home in each other and it is their bond that gives Wonka its solid foundation upon which it builds with great abandon castles of magic, dreams, and kaleidoscopic wonder.
King and Simon Farnaby’s script scrubs off all signs of whack, edginess, or eccentricity that you might associate with Willy Wonka, courtesy Dahl’s original text and the previous screen iterations played by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and more recently by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). Chalamet’s Willy has a heart of gold. Raised in poverty by a loving mother (Sally Hawkins) who encouraged him to dream, he does good and innocuously expects the same of others in return. Chalamet’s elfin innocence, boyish charm, towering talent, and magnetic screen presence add tremendously to the sculpting and bringing to life this new Willy who is a feast for sore eyes and sullen heart.
How can anyone talk about Willy Wonka and not mention Oompa-Loompa? Played with ridiculous aristocratic rigidity by Hugh Grant, he is an orange-faced, green-haired tiny man about a foot tall, who has also been rewritten and repackaged to better suit the contemporary lexicon. Exiled from his native Loompaland, he’s after Willy to avenge his stealing of four cocoa beans from his island home. There’s such rich subtext at play here —an Englishman furious over their natural reserves being pillaged and wanting it to be paid back a thousand times over. Irony much?
One may argue that King’s Wonka is too vanilla—it’s too sanitised and plays it too safe. But at a time when an entire nation and its people are being wiped off the map, films flaunting misogyny and bloodbath are making ₹500 crore in a week, inflation is peaking, and so is polarisation, and anxiety about the state of things, isn’t it incredibly comforting to return to good old vanilla? When the real stops making sense, it isn’t such a bad idea to take a flight of fancy and go see a candy man whose chocolates look like thunderclouds, giant flowers, and shimmery fruits and taste like sweet, sweet heaven.
Whether it be
Wonka or the recent
Wes Anderson short films on Netflix, the more Roald Dahl adaptations I watch on screen, the more I’m convinced that adults need him a lot more than children. I read the
Harry Potter series for the first time when I was 24. Growing up, even when everyone around me was hooked on the books, I never read them. And I’m glad that I didn’t because it’s easier for children to find hope and believe in magic. They are unburdened by the negotiations, the harsh truths, the pettiness, the fatigue, and the disillusionment that is so characteristic of adulthood. I was going through a sour, rough patch when I stumbled upon the books by sheer happenstance. I took to them like a dying person takes to life support. I’m not exaggerating, they saved me, and healed me in a way no amount of medicines or therapy could have.
A Timothée Chalamet movie release day feels like the Achhe Din that our revered Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised us about a decade ago. The 27-year-old actor never made the promise, but boy oh boy, is he delivering on it! This holiday season, go treat yourself to some Wonka chocolate.
You know you deserve it.
