Timothée Chalamet in Wonka
WONKA
Writer/director Paul King's musical-comedy prequel Wonka isn't hard to enjoy. Yet I'd argue that it'll be even easier if you manage to divorce yourself from memories of previous Willy Wonkas – Roald Dahl's, for sure, but also Gene Wilder's and Johnny Depp's.
What we get in this big-budget albeit charmingly old-fashioned family outing is essentially an origin story for the famed candymaker, following Willy from mid-20s poverty to staggering chocolatier success a few days, weeks, or months later. (The movie is a bit hazy on the specifics.) What we don't receive, though, is any clue regarding how this affable cutie with enviably high cheekbones could ever have become the secretive hermit of Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, or Wilder's gleefully perverse child torturer from 1971's film classic, or Depp's upsettingly pale whack-job from 2005's remake. For closure on any of that, I guess we'll have to wait for the inevitable sequel … at which point the Disneyfication of America may well be complete, and we'll be goaded into thinking Wonka was just a harmless, huggable sweetheart all along.
But that's to come. The Wonka we have now is mostly a delight, and mostly because the entertainment it keeps bringing to mind is Paddington – or rather, Paddington 2. Once you accept that geniality will be the movie's guiding principle, this is probably the best we could've hoped for. Although I grinned far more often than expected, I never actually laughed during King's latest, which is a claim I certainly can't make about the man's takes on the cuddly Peruvian bear with the floppy red hat. Yet like the Paddingtons, King's and co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby's extravagantly colorful Wonka is designed to resemble a pop-up storybook come to life, with the supporting cast's outsize comedic performances providing the popping. Running almost a full two hours, the film overstays its welcome, and the best you can say about Willy portrayer Timothée Chalamet is that he doesn't do anything to seriously undermine the fun. When Wonka is really working, however, you can ignore its length and its lead and simply relax in the confident silliness of it all, fully enjoying the inventively choreographed slapstick and mustache-twirling villainy, and waiting, ever so patiently, for appearances by Hugh Grant.
While the original songs here are consistently pleasant, it's a bit discouraging, in retrospect, to realize that the cleverest one is the “A Hatful of Dreams” opener that takes Willy from adventurous seafarer to European immigrant to penniless pauper over the course of four succinct minutes. In true Dahl-ian (or Dickensian) fashion, things look grim for our young hero from the get-go. First, Willy unwittingly signs himself into indentured servitude when he can't pay for his new lodgings and is forced to toil in the laundry room of the odious hotelier Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman) and her basso-voiced henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis). Then, after sneaking out at daylight with the aid of the orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane), Willy discovers the nightmare behind his dream of filling the town square with eager candy consumers: a trio of Chocolate Cartel meanies (Paterson Joseph's Slugworth, Matt Lucas' Prodnose, and Matthew Baynton's Fickelgruber) and the corrupt constable (Keegan-Michael Key) who want the kid to leave town pronto.
Oh, but there's more. Good heavens is there more. We're introduced to Willy's and Noodle's similarly imprisoned workhorses, a sympathetic quartet portrayed by Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Rakhee Thakrar, and Rich Fulcher, the latter as an aspiring standup who tells jokes even he knows are awful. (I dreaded the prospect of two hours spent with this guy, but blessedly, the unfunny-comic conceit is pretty speedily dropped.) We're given blissful flashback memories of Willy's childhood with his mom (the reliably radiant Sally Hawkins, who also played Paddington's “mom”), a woman who taught her son everything in the world about chocolate yet strangely forgot to teach him to read. There are grandly scaled musical numbers reminiscent of mid-1960s show-stoppers; confections that result in the power of flight and the quick growing of multi-hued locks; Rowan Atkinson as a long-faced priest. Plus, as the film's marketing has made abundantly clear, there's Paddington 2's best-in-show as the orange-faced, green-haired Oompa-Loompa Lofty, and literally the only disappointing thing about Hugh Grant's presence is that we're forced to anticipate it for more than an hour. This is a classic case of guest casting that would've been better kept a delicious surprise … though I can't deny the smile I sport every time that little bugger squats and kicks his way into my Facebook feed.
Clearly, this is a lot. That it's never too much is testament, in part, to King's gifts for expansive, live-action-cartoon mayhem; his staging tends to go over the top, then over that top. Yet while Wonka's helmer gives us dynamically rendered scenes of Willy and pals evading the law and treating baddies to their comeuppance, he also knows precisely how to temper the anarchy with wistful moments that are equal visual knockouts, such as Willy's and Noodle's gentle milking of a willing giraffe. Unlike most of his peers whose credits lean toward family comedy, King boasts a style that doesn't feel aggressive or pandering (pop-culture references are nearly nonexistent), and amazingly for expensive Hollywood-franchise fare, Wonka doesn't read as cynical; you get the sense that the film's creative team was potentially in it for reasons beyond the sizable paychecks. This movie is big but not obnoxious, and its blended storybook/playground atmosphere keeps things humming along even during the occasional lulls.
Without putting too much blame at Chalamet's feet, most of those lulls involve him. Yet it's not entirely the actor's fault, given that his role essentially requires that he simultaneously play Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket. Come to think of it, it's really more like Willy Wonka as Charlie Bucket, given that Chalmet's candyman isn't shown to have a sneakily subversive – to say nothing of mildly unsettling – bone in his body, and even his melancholy doesn't reach deeper than that of a high-schooler enacting Our Town's George Gibbs. Chalamet's golly-gee-whiz figure is simply nice, which is kind of the last thing Willy Wonka should be, and while his singing is adequate and his dancing is … there … Wonka's lead never truly sells his musical numbers, generally looking like the least comfortable participant in any given ensemble. Noodle has been designed with similar blandness, but it makes far more sense for her to be the narrative's Charlie stand-in, and the likable Calah Lane is at least allowed a few instances of amusingly deadpan incredulity. No such luck for Chalamet, who's a playful-enough presence, but who's also now more than six years into his film fame without yet exuding much in the way of recognizable personality. That isn't necessarily a detriment for character actors, but it very much is when the talent in question is being so obviously groomed to be A Star.
Thankfully for Chalamet's latest, what he lacks in demonstrated charisma is more than made up for in the contributions of others, with Colman going full-tilt Mrs. Lovett, the Joseph/Lucas/Baynton triumvirate playing “comically seedy” to the rafters, Atkinson stealing scenes via doleful expressions alone, and Key perhaps the most unanticipated hoot for (a) voicing his crooked cop in makeshift London with a loud, broad Noo Yawk accent, and (b) actually pulling this weird gambit off. (With Key's constable, in a touch Dahl would likely love, growing ever more corpulent through his dependence on sweets, there's a definite hint of De-Niro-in-Raging-Bull parody going on here.) Wonka may hardly be a classic in the Gene Wilder vein, but it's ticklish and winning regardless, as well as a work that conceivably opens doors for more satisfyingly bizarre adventures ahead. Hell, promise me two hours of Hugh Grant disputing Oomp-Loompa labor contracts and I'll give Warner Bros. my money this very day.
THE BOYS IN THE BOAT
It takes a certain degree of moxie to make a movie about American triumph at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and reduce Jesse Owens to a walk-on with two lines of dialogue while focusing instead on a bunch of interchangeable white guys. But maybe “moxie” isn't the right word. Should it be “shamelessness,” perhaps? Or “stupidity”? Or “madness”?
Whatever it is, George Clooney has it in abundance in his directorial effort The Boys & the Boat, and before I'm mocked for excessive woke-ism, let me state that Owens' near-invisibility here likely wouldn't have mattered much had we been given any reason to care about the film's eventual Olympic victors – the eight-man crew team, and their coxswain, who rose from humble, Depression-era beginnings to recognition as world-class athletes. Yet this historical drama that doubles as a triumph-of-the-underdog sports flick almost goes out of its way to ensure that we don't care, at least about the Olympians as individuals. At the climax to the film's sickly framing device that's unfortunately reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan's, a young towhead asks his grandfather what it was like to be among those eight champions. Salt-of-the-earth grandpa replies, “We weren't eight; we were one.” Which makes sense, considering the eight crew members here share enough collective personality to potentially fill one legitimate screen character.
I'm almost hesitant to describe just how actively I detested Clooney's film, because The Boys in the Boat is the very essence of “They don't make 'em like they used to” filmmaking that some audiences seem to still very much want. All the touchstones are accounted for: easily identifiable heroes (Americans – yay!) and villains (Hitler – boo!); gentle jokes with gentler punchlines; a chaste romance straight out of Mickey-and-Judy; mildly dramatic obstacles and impediments swiftly resolved; a wide array of period costumes and set dressing; a pushy, lump-in-the-throat musical score. (Thirty seconds into the opening refrain, and without knowing who the composer was before the credits offered proof, I quietly muttered, “F--- you, Alexandre Desplat.”)
Yet you know what other movies were made “like they used to”? Citizen Kane. All About Eve. Casablanca. Or to go less lofty: the Hepburn/Tracy comedies; the Thin Man mysteries; Pride of the Yankees. In Clooney's hands, “like they used to,” here, simply means “void of anything remotely objectionable, challenging, or even borderline interesting.” It's filmmaking for viewers who want as little surprise in their cinematic entertainment as possible. And while I have to admit that such a demographic exists, I fundamentally can't get on board with storytelling this profoundly paint-by-numbers – where not one unexpected development arises from scene to scene, and where the only identifiable personality trait, aside from those of greedy business tycoons and Nazis, is goodness. I've seen Sesame Street episodes with more interior conflict.
In its incurious simplicity, Clooney's film is dangerously close to offensive. Beyond Callum Turner's dead-eyed upstart Joe Rantz, I dare viewers to cite a single University of Washington JV crew member by name – and remember, these are the movie's title characters we're talking about. The most you can say for Rantz's eight teammates (coxswain included) are that one of them is slightly mouthy and another is an introvert who plays the piano well and almost – maybe? – dies of some undiagnosed illness. (Without a word as to what specifically ailed him, this guy at death's door apparently recovers through the mere act of scolding.) A financial crisis that might prevent the team from getting to Berlin is handled with the lightning-quick fix of Herbert Hoover initiating the New Deal in Annie. Though photographic evidence to the contrary is offered, Rantz has been made a platinum blond for what can only be our ability to instantly recognize him on a boat, with his egregiously inconsequential girlfriend Joyce (an overtly hard-working Hadley Robinson) given the exact same dye job. Nearly every scene in The Boys in the Boat gave me something to gripe about, and Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith somehow manage to muck up even theoretically can't-miss crowd-pleasing effects. How do you bookend this film with the reveries of a now-elderly Rantz alongside his grandkid and not mention, in an end-credits update, that he and Joyce went on to an apparently happy marriage of 63 years?
Was there anything about this doggedly square achievement I legitimately admired? Sure. During one of the rowing competitions, I quite enjoyed learning that spectators-with-means in the mid-'30s were able to watch the proceedings in real time while traveling beside the athletes on a shoreline locomotive. And although I don't know how true the moment was, considering that it felt ready-made for the movies and I didn't care enough to check out the details online, the climactic match in Berlin was reasonably engaging – not for the event itself, but for forcing the painstaking time and busywork of an actual photo finish. Let's count everything else as a miss, from Turner's charisma-free leading portrayal to Joel Edgerton's weirdly inconsequential head-coach role to the fact that I still don't know what a coxswain is good for except to routinely shout at teammates while doing zero physical labor beyond yelling. With The Boys in the Boat a deathly predictable, insultingly banal work – if one that will no doubt make a lot of viewers really happy – I'm just glad I caught a sneak preview of the movie this past Sunday, and didn't wait until its actual nationwide release on Christmas Day. The holidays can be trying enough.
CHICKEN RUN: DAWN OF THE NUGGET
It says a lot about the consistently high quality of Aardman Animation that the new-to-Netflix Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is probably the company's least successful and satisfying feature-length offering and it's still pretty fun.
Arriving 23 years after the original Chicken Run wowed audiences and reviewers (including this one) during a weak summer season, this followup basically replays many of its forebear's greatest hits with daring escapes, cheeky British wordplay, tactile claymation, and Miranda Richardson again devouring the nonexistent scenery as that vicious poultry hater Melisha Tweedy. In its family-first dynamics, director Sam Fell's outing is more sentimental than its predecessor, and subsequently less appealing; even the youngest of audiences don't need maudlin music cues to hope that our heroic flightless birds don't turn into finger food. But while Dawn of the Nugget is largely dispensable and doesn't deliver the belly laughs we wanted and should have expected, the movie's 95 minutes are still friendly and breezy enough, and if Zachary Levi's former circus rooster Rocky is no match in laughs for the first film's Mel Gibson … hey, he ain't Mel Gibson, either. I'd still rather watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit or Early Man or either of the Shaun the Sheep Movies any day of the week, but I'll hardly blight an entertainment that proves that the secret to a long, healthy life is popcorn. Die-hard moviegoers have known that for ages.
