2023-12-08 14:47:15
Before Christmas should actually be the time for the Nutri-Score, this traffic light on food packaging that is supposed to hit the stomachs of all those who are heavily addicted to sweets and thus contribute to the health of society as a whole. Of course, every reasonably experienced moviegoer knows that printing on the backs of speculoos and gingerbread bags is not enough. Anyone who exposes themselves to the seasonal program of films and television during Advent also gets a sugar shock.
Which brings us to “Wonka.” This is the ultimate Christmas movie. The domino of the Advent cinema, so to speak. Its cinematic Nutri-Score is predictably deep red (lots of sugar, lots of calories, lots of sentimental salt).
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This is because the story of Willy Wonka is that of a person who is firmly convinced that the world, which we currently believe is heading towards its ruin, can be saved. If only we all ate enough chocolate.
Anyone who is now scratching their head and asking whether they don’t know Willy Wonka as the ghost of a Christmas past is right to do so. Willy Wonka is even the ghost of three Christmases past. He arrived in the literary world in 1964 as a sort of Elon Musk of chocolate making. The book was called “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The great and nasty children’s book god Roald Dahl wrote it. In 1971, Willy came to the cinema in a brightly colored and appropriately Dahlesque-bizarre musical fairy tale in the form of Gene Wilder.
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A good thirty years later, Willy – now embodied by Johnny Depp – with a purple frock coat, top hat and absurdly perfect teeth, went wild in an industrial monument that was a wild cross between a Victorian power station, Teletubbie and Neverland. In it, Tim Burton, the incomparable, told how Willy Wonka became the eccentric, sociopathic chocolate mogul. Because of – we’re in a Tim Burton film – his father, that is. He was a dentist and a sadist and, funnily enough, he looked like Dracula because Christopher Lee played him.
And because, thanks to Burton, we already knew Willy’s backstory, which even Roald Dahl didn’t know, or at least hadn’t told, the trailer for “Wonka” made people wonder whether what Paul King, the father of “Paddington” -Films, as now wanted to tell in “Wonka”, could not be as superfluous as a tie under the tree. The backstory of Willy Wonka namely.
Magical chocolates
And this is how “Wonka” begins: Willy, we are a good two decades before Tim Burton’s steampunk candy machine, comes ashore after seven years on the seven seas. With infinitely delicious recipes for infinitely delicious chocolates and the enormous raisin in mind to open a chocolate shop in the Galleries Gourmet of a coastal town that looks like an Art Deco brainchild of Milan, Paris, London and Oxford. With magical chocolates that make people and the world float.
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The mafia-like Lord Seal Keepers of traditional chocolate – which we have to imagine like the hideous British bar product – are of course suspicious of the spider-legged dreamer in the purple velvet frock coat. They do everything to protect their cartel. They bribe the police. Arrest Willy, who has a fatal reading disability, with the criminal landlady Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman). Forced to do slave labor at the washing tub, he meets – we are in a children’s fairy tale – four friends who are no better off and who become his family, which he, the young man with the trauma of his mother, never had.
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There is dancing, there is singing. “Wonka” has a nice rhythm and a nostalgic, almost a bit restorative tone. Trace elements of Dahlian nastiness can be found in King’s chocolate fountain and remnants of Dickensian social romanticism. Rowan (“Mr. Bean”) Atkinson plays a chocoholic priest with a penchant for — fans of “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” take note — cloaks in ecclesiastical purple and pagan orange. Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka flies and charms as a kind of 21st century Gene Kelly over breaks in this surprisingly light calorie heavyweight. He makes “Wonka” the Christmas miracle that it is.
And Hugh Grant, of course. He’s Dahl’s Oompa-Loompa. Orange-skinned, green-haired. A grumpy gnome whose song you happily hum to yourself afterwards on the way to the nearest chocolate dealer. And it doesn’t matter that some idiots previously thought that Oompa-Loompas were only allowed to be played by people of short stature.
In general, because this film just wants to play and let everyone who sees it float like Willy’s wonderful chocolate and manages to do that, you don’t care about a lot afterwards. To all the ghosts of this present Christmas. And the cinematic Nutri-Score.
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