Textual Chocolate

Tim Burton is reluctant to give audiences simple satisfactions; he'd rather complicate our responses by making pleasure painful and pain pleasurable. These qualities make him the ideal director to remake Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a sweet-and-sour fable.

Burton has never reconciled his showman and artist sides, and that lack of resolution still fuels-and is the true subject of-his filmography. It's what makes his movies feel private and handmade even when they're gigantic; it's the temperamental through line that made it possible for him to direct both Batman and Ed Wood. His heroes, villains, sidekicks and bit players are united by a private melancholy, and the movies anticipate skeptics' ridicule and counter it with cackling cruelty (the murderous, bikini-bottomed aliens in Mars Attacks!) or moon-eyed sincerity (Edward Scissorhands' courtship by ice sculpture). Even his most disheveled, unsatisfying blockbusters (Mars Attacks!, Planet of the Apes) seem as private as uncaptioned sketchbook doodles. Burton invites one-to-one, autobiography-to-fantasy readings by making his heroes stand in for artists, fringe-dwellers or both. He's a blockbuster director who's temperamentally unsuited to making blockbusters.

The unease isn't hard to spot. Some of his early work now seems overpraised-jolly but disorganized, more a grab bag of storybook images, contraptionist slapstick and willed moments of "wonder" (cue childrens' choir) than fully formed statements. His recent work displays more structural intelligence and a tighter grasp of metaphor-particularly novelist-screenwriter John August's Big Fish, which considers the autobiographical significance of stories and the emotional costs of spinning them. Displaying an old man's wisdom, Burton simultaneously identified with the film's morose, resentful, "responsible" son and his salesman/storyteller/liar of a dad. The result was a small wonder-an emotional projection device that let the director view art, commerce, family and myth from inside (emotionally) and outside (intellectually), interrogate his own impulses, and analyze a legacy he wasn't done creating.

Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which reunites him with many of his trusted collaborators-August, editor Chris Lebenzon, composer Danny Elfman-isn't as rich, deep and unabashedly emotional as Big Fish. Riffing on Roald Dahl's classic about a candy mogul (Johnny Depp) leading Golden Ticket?holders on a tour of his magical factory, it's a bigger, edgier, wackier, less sentimental picture, and therefore less commercially risky. (Big Fish was a box-office dud.) Burton's cinematic tells are front-and-center: a storybook framing device; super-wide-angle master shots; clockwork machinery; tributes to stage magic and baggy-pants vaudeville; copious music and film references, from Citizen Kane and 2001 to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Hair. (Awkwardly greeting ticket holders and their guardians, Wonka stammers, "Good morning, Starshine! Greetings from planet Earth!")

As in the novel, poor-boy hero Charlie Bucket (Freddy Highmore) lucks into a Golden Ticket entitling him to a tour of Wonka's wonderland, where his intelligence and kindness define him against his bratty rivals, gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb), gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz), rich daddy's girl Veruca Salt (Julia Winter) and the most frightening child of all, beady-eyed, mumbling videogame addict Mike Teavee (Jordon Fry), whose conscience and imagination have been obliterated. Whenever one of the children disregards Wonka's instructions and blunders into punishment, the Oompa Loompas, all played by digital copies of the same actor, Deep Roy, celebrate with musical numbers in a variety of genres (disco, flower child pop, Esther Williams water ballet), chanting lyrics drawn from verses in Dahl's novel.

Unlike Gene Wilder's Wonka in the 1971 original, Depp and Burton's version isn't icy and droll. (Wilder's Wonka to Mike Teavee: "Stop. Don't. Come back.") Depp's Wonka could be a socially inept cousin of industrialist Max Shreck in Batman Returns, or name-your-eccentric-artist-slash-mogul. (Michael Jackson?) Because Depp plays Wonka as a top-hatted Lost Boy, we never find him frightening, just eccentric and damaged, and the movie reassures us that when Charlie's kid rivals get sucked into chocolate tubes or transformed into huge blueberries, they're not doomed, just humiliated. Between Burton's aggressive, italicizing camerawork and Geoffrey Holder's bourbon-smooth third-person narration, Charlie is kin to such French fairy tales as City of Lost Children and Amelie. It's muscular whimsy. Despite its morose wit and distinctively English delight in torturing bad kids, it somehow registers as sweet, not sour or bitter-a neat trick.

But if Burton's tonal sleight of hand disguises the movie's personal nature, it doesn't obliterate it. Charlie dovetails with Big Fish because they're both concerned with the artist's struggle to control his work without shutting himself off from life, and his related urge to accept mortality, reach out to descendants (biological or artistic) and pass on knowledge and love.Ê

Where Charlie was the center of both the novel and the 1971 movie, Burton's version is equally interested in the poor, unknown boy (read: aspiring artist) and the lonely mogul (read: established artist). Charlie might be Burton circa 1965-a gangly dreamer who emulates his hero by building a scale model of Wonka's factory from bits of toothpaste tubes. Wonka might be a worst-case version of the director after 10 more years, five more movies and several tax brackets: a hermit visionary who tries to shield himself from every conceivable type of injury, from financial (to thwart industrial spies, he's replaced his human work force with Oompa Loompas) to emotional (he's a recluse who communicates with the public via printed flyers).

The movie depicts Charlie's childhood as the inverse of Wonka's: Where the former has no money but plenty of warmth (four grandparents!), Wonka is the son of the town's richest dentist (Burton favorite Christopher Lee), a man who deprives his son of pleasure (specifically candy) and outfits him with the most hideous braces since little Robbie Freeling got ensnared by his own toothwear in Poltergeist II. Rethinking Dahl's novel as a parable of an established artist learning to trust a young admirer whose life bears no resemblance to his own, Burton conflates fathers and sons with celebrity artists and their open-hearted acolytes. It's a touching trope that should resonate with anyone whose life has been transformed by love for an artist and his work. In a way, Charlie could be Burton's long-delayed answer-across-time to his own short film Vincent (1982), a tribute to key influences (Dr. Seuss, Edgar Allan Poe, James Whale) that was narrated by one of his childhood idols, Vincent Price (who also had a cameo in Burton's Edward Scissorhands).

Charlie is as obsessed with evolution (emotional, social, artistic) as Planet of the Apes and Big Fish. Burton's intent is disclosed in the Wonkavision studio sequence, in which a Wonka candy bar is miniaturized, beamed across the room and inserted into the "Dawn of Man" sequence from 2001. The candy bar as monolith isn't just a dandy Kubrick joke; it connects Burton's art, Wonka's invention and Charlie's fanboy sweetness, and suggests that the three are variants of the same impulse to achieve and transform oneself, to become what one was meant to be. (The movie anchors adult drives in childhood experience; that's why Mr. Wonka's row house is shaped like the monolith and the Wonka bar.)

Charlie is neither Burton's most vulnerable movie nor his most structurally accomplished. But it's shot through with brilliant images and moments, and it's as personal as Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish. The artist's blood courses through every frame. Burton's career recalls a line from Pauline Kael's introduction to her 1995 anthology For Keeps: "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have."