Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - DVD Review

There’s no dream team quite like Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Their previous collaborations – the bittersweet fable Edward Scissorhands, affectionate biopic Ed Wood, and melodramatic fairytale Sleepy Hollow – are classic studies in Hollywood eccentricity, each distinct in their unforgettable chemistry between director and star. Yet while Burton’s retelling of Roald Dahl’s children’s favourite, with Depp as the enigmatic Willy Wonka, would seem destined for similar genius, the psychedelic concussion of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is arguably their most unsatisfying endeavour. Not surprisingly, it was also their biggest box-office hit.

Burton revisits the original text, rather than the 1971 musical version, for his inspiration, promising to plug into Dahl’s darker themes and treat them with his own trademark Pop-Gothic aesthetic. But Depp, replete with pallid visage and fey intonation, over-cooks the quirk in a hit-and-miss performance that seems strenuously designed to be as creepy as possible. Comparisons with the Gene Wilder-starring interpretation are inevitable. Ironically, Wilder’s cheerful countenance suggested something far more sinister than Depp’s deliberately off-colour menace – when his Wonka snapped it was scary, whereas Depp’s reading is so eager to unnerve that he doesn’t have anywhere left to go.

But screenwriter John August, who penned Burton’s tediously “mature” Big Fish, finds somewhere for Wonka to go, all right – and it isn’t pretty. He inserts a gratuitous explanation of Wonka’s parentage (an unfortunate waste of the great Christopher Lee) that extends the story well beyond its natural point of resolution, labours to explore the birth of his chocolate factory, and serves up a laughable interlude on the origins of the Oompa Loompas – effectively removing any sense of the character’s mystery.

It’s this need to lay everything out for the audience – a curse of modern screenwriting – that proves to be a real problem for the director’s own instincts. Burton excels when the story resonates visually rather than narratively, and there’s a sense that Charlie may have soared had he been freed of the ugly constraints of exposition. The story clutter, moreover, tends to push Charlie’s character – so focal in the old film – into the background.

Still, this is Tim Burton, and as such the film has enough twisted charm and imagination to remain in a class of its own. The production design is spectacular, imagining the Bucket’s home-town as a kind of Victorian Gotham City and Wonka’s factory as a surreal pop culture fun house that only Burton could conjure. The performances of the younger actors, especially the gifted, if occasionally sooky, Freddie Highmore as Charlie, and Annasophia Robb as Violet, are all immaculate. And Danny Elfman provides some exquisitely over-the-top musical pieces that all but recast his former band Oingo Boingo as Spinal Tap.

And, as always, there’s the magnificent Mr Depp, ever the most watchable of freaks, even if he is slipping in and out of accents, looking perplexed at his slight lines and, most frustratingly, hinting at the mad, memorable turn that might have been.