Wonka (Dec 23)

I’m going to be honest with you, we didn’t see Wonka because we thought it was going to be good. It was kind of the only thing (besides Aquahombre 2) that fit into the timeslot we had in the evening after the hostage negotiations with our monsters concluded and they agreed to go to sleep for a couple hours before waking up three to five times in the night and morning to compensate for their temporary good behavior. So, we went because holy cow when else are we going to see this many movies, amirite? And boy was this divisive.

I was aware at the time, of course, that this movie marked the end of Timothee Chalamet’s “heartthrob era” as Vulture put it, and that he owes all of his success to Black culture, as Slate put it, but I wanted to scout out this movie for the monsters and hoped that maybe it would contain within it some of the morsels of absurdist humor and electric silly energy in its dialogue as the 1971 adaptation with Gene Wilder, to which this movie owes all of its inspiration, rather than the fever dream debacle that is the Johnny Depp adaptation. As we were walking out of the theater, Wife turned to me and said, “You really liked that, didn’t you?” which I think was my first indication that she, a lover of Roald Dahl like myself, was maybe less than impressed or maybe a little embarrassed by it. “Earnest” was the word she said she would use to describe the movie, which I think was her way of saying “cringe.” But she also said that Wonka himself was a bit all over the place in his performance. The thing that makes the Wonka story so compelling, she says, is that he’s a chocolatier who apparently hates children, a moody, tempestuous genius who tests his most ardent fans with a series of trials. He’s someone who nonconsensually includes side effects in his candies. At his core, he like Owen Wilson in Loki, is melancholy. And there’s definitely some elements of sincerity that seem treacly and maudlin, the way that he’s always quoting his mom’s advice, but at the same time there’s that element of tragic nostalgia, dark melancholy in the way that he doesn’t just whimsically believe that going into the chocolate business will bring back the good feelings of being with his mom, but actually bring back his mom. He’s not just crushed because their first day of sales are ruined by the cartel, he’s genuinely sad that his dead mom is still dead, which is, whoa, oh boy in my books, but maybe too much for Wife. Sometimes, she goes on, he was silly and energetic, over-the-top like Gene Wilder, but then other times he played it a lot more reserved. It all felt a little bit uneven, she says.

I think it’s useful to mention when each of us laughed out loud, involuntarily charmed by the humor of the movie: Wife’s was in the first half hour when Wonka almost gets eaten by a tiger because he’s actually illiterate. Mine is toward the end when a chocolatier is asked to remember the name of a poor woman who is of great value to another character on screen and he can’t, because why would he ever take the time to retain that name?

Wife says that she’s hard-pressed to remember the last time a movie musical starts with an original song, and that this exemplifies the ways in which the movie is fully committed to how earnest it’s going to be. She and I are in agreement that more than one of the songs was a banger, and that we weren’t expecting so many of them to be so catchy. And that’s about where our agreement stopped. I loved how silly the dialogue was. How much the reality of the world warps around the silliness of the dialogue. The callbacks to the original movie. The endless cameos. The visual humor. The darkness of not having an escape plan when drowning in chocolate. All of it is something I’m here for and I think you should be too.