Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The biggest departure from the book is not in the middle but at the end. Tim Burton and screenwriter John August invented a father for Wonka, a dentist who appears nowhere in Roald Dahl, and that quietly relocates the film: the last twenty minutes care less about Charlie’s prize than about Wonka closing his own wound. If you are watching with a child who knows the book by heart, the ending is a different story from the one they read. Johnny Depp does not play Wonka as a figure who enchants children. He plays a man who recoils from them and flinches at the word parents; the discomfort is a choice, not an accident. The look was deliberate too: the bob and glasses came from the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, the manner from children’s television presenters. Much of what you see is real. The chocolate river was built at Pinewood, water thickened and dyed into a stream of roughly 190,000 gallons. The nut cracking squirrels are mostly real too: forty trained over nineteen weeks to sit on stools, open walnuts and drop them onto the belt. Every Oompa-Loompa is one actor, Deep Roy, replicated 165 times. Danny Elfman did not write the lyrics; he set Dahl’s original verses. Burton told August not to watch the 1971 version before writing.