rated PG-13

“He’s gone off his rocker!” shouted one of the fathers, aghast, and the other parents joined in the chorus of frightened shouting. “He’s crazy!” they shouted.
He’s also “batty” and “buggy,” to name just a few of the things outraged parents call him. He is, of course, Willy Wonka: mad-genius chocolatier, inventor of “luminous lollies for eating in bed at night,” “exploding candy for your enemies” and just desserts for greedy children.
Similar terms have been used to describe Roald Dahl, the unabashedly batty children’s author who invented Willy Wonka (and from whose 1964 novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” the above passage comes), as well as other darkly comic delights like “Matilda,” “The BFG” and “The Witches.” Dahl makes some parents uneasy because his is a world in which bad things—adults, mostly—happen to good children. That those same children manage, by dint of their own intelligence and decency, to prevail in the end also explains his books’ enormous appeal.
That filmmaker Tim Burton would find “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” appealing isn’t a surprise. As the director of such deliriously batty films as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Ed Wood, Burton can surely identify with an eccentric genius whose imagination is so prodigious it requires a vast, Victorian factory to house it. He’s also intrigued by a question Dahl left unanswered: Who, exactly, is Willy Wonka, and where did he come from?
Burton’s film is, in most respects, faithful to Dahl’s story of four children—the singularly unappealing Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregard and Mike Teavee—who, along with the poor but saintly Charlie Bucket, find one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets and win a tour of his mysterious factory. But the departure that he and screenwriter John Houston do make is a doozy, and one likely to leave some parents aghast, younger children creeped out, and Dahl purists both.
Rather than a benevolent imp, their Willy Wonka is (as played by Johnny Depp, Burton’s fearless alter ego) something of a freak, an aging Edward Scissorhands who makes candy not for the pleasure it gives children, but, like most artists, as an obsessive response to his own childhood. In Burton’s eyes, it isn’t Charlie who needs saving, but rather Wonka himself. His chocolate factory is a garish Technicolor Oz full of marvels and delights (and Oompa-Loompas, all of them played by actor Deep Roy), but it’s also a lonely prison whose front gates shut with a heavy clang behind the visiting children.
Young Charlie (the engaging Freddie Highmore, who starred opposite Depp in last year’s Finding Neverland), by contrast, lives in a drab English city, in a tiny, tumbledown house he shares with his mother, father and four grandparents. But he is, as the narration is a little too quick to point out, “the luckiest boy in the world”—not because he finds a Golden Ticket, but because he has, quite literally, a close family. That this world is as affecting as it is is a tribute to the marvelously sooty sets that Burton and his designers have created, and to Highmore and David Kelly (Charlie’s Grandpa Joe), both of whom are sweetly genuine without ever being sugary.
The flavor of Depp’s performance is something else altogether, and because of his willingness to go absolutely anywhere with a part, preferably right around the bend in a purple frock coat and Louise Brooks bob, it is also oddly and entirely delectable. And where Dahl’s Wonka is all high spirits and high English humor, Depp’s is all nervous tics and flat Americanisms. When Charlie suggests there’s more to life than chocolate, Depp looks taken aback. “That’s . . . unexpected,” he sputters. “And weird.”
Weird is also a fair description for the feeling you get watching Burton stage the dire fates that befall the other children, scenes that seem darkly comic on the page but which onscreen feel uncomfortably close to child abuse. A movie that makes you feel sorry for Veruca Salt is one that makes the case for leaving well enough alone. With or without a glass elevator, Burton shares Dahl’s special genius for taking us “up and out,” but there are some flights best taken in your imagination.