Readers Write In #708: In the moodle for chocolate

By Karthik Amarnath

Happy World Chocolate Day, from Roald, Tim, Gene and John

As a parent in America, the day I dread most is Halloween. Each year it’s an overcrowded audition, for a Disney-DC-Potter crossover movie, where bad actors in loose costumes mouth the same line over and over. Trick or Treat? Trick or Treat? Trick or Treat? But there’s no trick. So each time I hear the line, I dole out a treat, and I do that a hundred times in one evening (not kidding, I live in a rather large neighborhood). But the part I really dread comes at the end of all this, when my six year old returns home with a plastic pumpkin full of poison candy, and her head full of dreams— sweet, sugary, high fructose corn syrupy dreams that I will need to shatter. You want real horror, try taking candy away from a tired little kid. That’s a Halloween nightmare.

I’m not a candy person. I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth. But even if I did, I wouldn’t eat candy, which is at best a basic banal fix. When I have a sweet craving, which I do from time to time, my poison of choice has always been chocolate. Let me clarify the difference between the two, which is debatable, but my version goes like this. If you take chocolate, and remove the best ingredient— cocoa— and replace it with the worst— any and all forms of poison sugar— you get candy. Candy is the dessert equivalent of today’s Tamil mass movie. Sure, there’s variety in candy— lollipops, jelly beans, taffies and the like. Just as there’s variety in our mass movies. But we all know, that no matter how different the writing, staging, shooting, editing are, they are just cute colors and fake flavors designed to sell the poison sugar slo-mo sequences of strutting superstars.

Ok, I know I’m being a bit snobbish; I blame years of adulting for that.  And I get it. Candy is cheap. It’s easy. It’s often a good quick fix. But here’s what it isn’t: a delectably divine creation like a chocolate truffle. That dreamy dew drop from heaven, with its unmissable aroma of cocoa, a velvety smooth surface, glistening in the light, and seducing the senses. A concoction that opens layers of flavors with each bite, from the soft, nutty crunch to the luscious creamy ooze. An experience so finely crafted to trigger the deepest corners of your taste buds, leaving you with the afterglow of pure pleasure. Now, give me a pumpkin full of that, and I’ll be flying through Haloween with a halo and a pair of wings.

The gravity defying magic of great chocolate turns out to be literally true in the film Wonka— the new origin story for famous fictional chocolatier, Willy Wonka. In the movie, Willy Wonka, wearing a top hat and his trademark purple overcoat, stands like a magician, at the center of the Galleries Gourmet marketplace, and unveils his new chocolate invention called a Hoverchoc. He hands it to three fellow chocolatiers, who seconds after eating it, and much to their own dismay, start to levitate as though the tiny truffles had unleashed bursts of Helium. But we know it wasn’t Helium hiding in the chocolate. It was a “hoverfly” (from Mumbai), as we heard minutes earlier, to the tune of Never had chocolate like this, one of the many delightfully sweet songs in this whimsical musical. (By the way, I am not snobbish when it comes to music. Give me a clever rhyme and a tune to hum, and I’ll lap it up like bubble gum.)

Wonka is the latest entry into the enduring cinematic legacy of its eponymous hero since he first leapt off the pages of Roald Dahl’s book, and into the body of Gene Wilder, for the 1971 Mel Stuart musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Despite being a children’s film, replete with candy colored visuals and sweet sounding music, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn’t sugarcoat its story. From the Dickensian squalor of the main character, Charlie Bucket, to the distrustful misanthropic Willy Wonka, and the delectably devious punishments he metes out to children, the film, like the book, didn’t shy away from getting dark and dirty— literally dirty, as one of the kids gets flushed down a garbage chute.

On its surface, Dahl’s story can be seen as a flat-out fairytale: a poor pure-as-milk boy Charlie wins a golden ticket to a greater destiny. But inside is the darker tale of a bitter broken inventor’s search for his soul, that of a boy who had once wanted nothing more than to share the sweet gifts of his imagination with the world. Gene Wilder plays this role with a charming eccentricity and an understated menace. Just watch his eyes flit and flicker as he takes a group of kids on a rollercoaster ride from hell, or the way they soften when he finally gives in to Charlie. Or watch his dreamy-eyed rendition of that timeless ode to Pure Imagination.

The new Wonka rewinds this story by a few decades to show us that soul of a young Wonka as he opens the film singing a Hatful of Dreams. And far from Gene Wilder’s aging candy man, Wonka gives us the quintessential chocolate boy in Timothee Chalamet. Bathed in milky goodness, Chalamet’s Wonka wears his hat and coat with a dimple-cheeked smile ahe oodles of youthful innocence. Chalamet’s oodles of acting talent needs no introduction, but in many of his previous outings, be it the drug- addled son in A Beautiful Boy, the adolescent facing love and heartbreak in Call me by your name, or the chosen savior of the masses in the Dune movies, he had brought quiet (and not so quiet) intensity to his characters. Here, in contrast, he just glides through the role of Willy Wonka with a zippy charisma and such weightless whimsy that I was reminded of Johnny Depp in the Pirates movies. If Pirates of the Caribbean were to get a prequel, then Chalamet is who I’d pick to play a young Captain Jack Sparrow. If you don’t trust me, just watch the opening sequence of Wonka, where he stands atop a sail, looking out for a shore, and then prances and dances his way through the ship. Now tell me that’s not a hat tip to Depp’s most iconic role.

Or perhaps, that was a hat tip to the actor Depp, who had his own take on Willy Wonka, in Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If a film could win purely as eye candy, then of the three Willy Wonka films, Tim Burton’s version takes the chocolate and the factory. It takes imagination as twisted as Burton’s to conceive Charlie Bucket’s house as crooked and eccentric as characters that populate this story. And it takes a shape-shifter like Depp to dial up the creeps to match Burton’s design, one spooky smile at a time.

Sumptuous visuals aside, Burton’s film stayed close to Dahl’s book, arguably more so than the Mel Stuart version. But there’s one notable addition— an origin story that takes place on Halloween night, when a young Willy Wonka returns home with a plastic pumpkin, to an overbearing dentist father, who puts enormous dental gear around Wonka’s mouth— a visual metaphor for stifling individuality. Poor parenting was a major theme of Dahl’s book where obnoxious kids were spoilt by over-indulgent parents. Burton doubles down by also showing us the other extreme. When Wonka’s father rifles through the pumpkin, he picks up the candy, and scoffs. “Cavities on a stick!” he calls a lollipop, before shoving all the candy into a burning fireplace (can you really blame him?) But somehow, a solitary truffle survives, giving Wonka his first taste of magic chocolate, and the courage to break free of his parental shackles.

The new Wonka completely does away with the bad parenting themes. In fact, Wonka’s most poignant moments arise between characters and their mothers. For replacement themes, Wonka picks up the flavors du jour of corporate greed and social justice. But the film isn’t weighed down by the lofty ideas, thanks to cartoonish characters and the frothy tone. Take the ultra-rich chocolatiers who collude to stop Wonka from setting up his own little store. Their snobbery comes down to a man’s bulbous nose and a silly sight gag, where he can’t say the word “poor” without gagging. And crony capitalism is just a policeman with a Sweet Tooth.

Or take the wash house where Wonka gets tricked into slave labor. The characters names there sound straight out of a six year old’s storybook. The wash house is run by Mr. Bleachers and Ms. Scrubbit (a scene stealing performance by “Queen” Olivia Colman). The trapped “slaves” includes a comedian named Chucklesworth and an accountant named Abacus Crunch. Crunch is played by Jim Carter who gets an odd reprisal of his iconic role as lead servant from Downton Abbey. But unlike the stuffed shirt he plays in Downton, Carter gets to free his vocal cords here, for the song Scrub, Scrub, whose simple tune and monotonous meter mirrors the domestic drudgery he sings about.

Amongst those slaving in the wash house is also a young black girl, curiously named Noodle. Played by Calah Lane, Noodle’s character adds a weight and warmth to balance the cool and featherlight Wonka. The two share great chemistry, and a lovely little duet sung while milking a giraffe. Wonka first mumbles that “Noodle” is hard to rhyme with, and he makes up words like to-dle and true-dle. But as soon as she starts singing, For a moment, as if the sound of music had clicked something inside, he crisply comes up with Apple Strudel, and follows it up with doodle, poodle, oodle, and a made-up word in moodle. There’s a sly twist in the film about how Noodle almost gets out of the wash house, through an “emancipation” agreement but it doesn’t work, which offers some social commentary if you choose to read into it.

Wonka is a potpourri of plot points and people, and each one, like Wonka’s inventions, seem sourced from a different place and time. Even the songs sound like bits and pieces of tunes we’ve heard elsewhere. But everything’s held together by the sweet magic of chocolate and Chalamet. There isn’t a conflict in the film that a confectionery cannot solve. A man’s too scared to propose? There’s a macaroon from Manila to make him feel tall. A girl is looking for hope? There’s a chocolate laced with silver linings. Even a larger plot point gets washed away in a chocolate fountain. In another film, a design like this could have turned cloyingly repetitive, but here, Chalamet sells it all with such doe-eyed determination that we want to buy it all.

Or it could just be that I’d been adulting for far too long. Perhaps it was time to rewind, let out the inner six year-old, and hand over a pumpkin full of sugary sweet goodness magic.