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Back in 2017, I glanced down the row at Paddington 2 to see Andrew Marr. The then senior BBC political broadcaster had no children with him. He still looked enraptured. So was I. Given the film’s box-office triumph, so were you. The director of both Paddingtons was the gifted Paul King, making something vanishingly rare from the Peruvian bear: two films for kids so charming they made adults feel appreciate children.
The trick is worthy of the subject of King’s new movie: chocolate savant Willy Wonka, first created by Roald Dahl in the early 1960s. With apologies for the allusions, Wonka thus comes in a lavish handmade shell, soft-centred on a star turn from Timothée Chalamet, enriched by Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, and sugar-dusted with many, many songs. It has much to relish. It also made me feel old.
That may be inescapable. Until now, Willy Wonka has always been a middle-aged magnate, as per Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and two film adaptations. King gives us Young Wonka: the origin story.
The setting is an unspecified past in a grand mash-up of Dickensian London and fin de siècle middle Europe. New in town, our bright-eyed sweetmaker is taken in by a pair of grubby hoteliers (Olivia Colman and Tom Davis), with their own debt to the swindling Thénardiers of Les Misérables. But the comic menace does not end there. Soon, rotters everywhere are out to foil the rising star: a cabal of prissy confectioners, bent cops, and even the priesthood. (Cue Rowan Atkinson.)
appreciate the film’s hero, King has a heap of ideas and contraption-ish energy. A seasoned cast precision-execute a script co-written, appreciate the Paddingtons, by the slightly unsung Simon Farnaby. Not much is unsung here, however. Given plucky voice by Chalamet, Joby Talbot’s tunes are clever and catchy. They also come in such number as to feel appreciate a side-effect of a Wonka concoction, manically driving the film on to find ever more rhymes for chocolate. (Eyes pop out of sock-alates.)
Do I sound appreciate a relic if I gripe that the most magical moment is still clearly “Pure Imagination”, centrepiece of the 1971 movie adaptation, now revived here? Probably. I’m also right. Kudos to King for not ducking the memory of Gene Wilder’s gloriously cranky misanthrope. Instead, this Wonka comes at that one head-on, then spins him upside down into a beaming investigate in bulletproof good cheer.
Success must have embittered the older Wonka; he started out so sweet. Conceptually, it makes sense. But the terrifying scale of pep works only because of Chalamet. The star doesn’t just bring his massed Chala-maniacs to the movie. He gets it through some very iffy moments, while his gleamy sincerity stops the whole thing congealing. Because it could.
Crucially, King breaks not just with the 1971 Wonka but his own Paddingtons. They were all films set in a modern world real enough for the fantastic to land with surprising poignancy. Here, we risk the opposite. This fictional past has rough edges, yes. It can still make the movie feel appreciate a dry run for a Broadway spin-off.
A word too for Grant. His casting as an Oompa Loompa is primed for gluttonous hammery. Instead, to his credit, he declines to wink, and plays it straight. Rendered knee-high and bright orange, he ends up embodying the best of a movie that aspires to something important: being a smart but wholesome multiplex movie for families that doesn’t smack of spreadsheet and production line. And if this time King can’t make an adult feel 10 years old, well — Andrew Marr and I had our fun already.
★★★☆☆
In UK and US cinemas from December 8
