What the Hell Is Going on With ‘Wonka’?

What do we know about Willy Wonka? He’s a candy manufacturer who specializes in whimsical concoctions that require extensive testing. He’s a showman, a trickster, and a bit of a narcissist. He’s a paranoid eccentric who laid off an entire workforce to protect his precious trade secrets. He stole an entire race of little people and put them to work in his factory in exchange for cocoa beans. And he’s a psychopath who delights in subjecting children who unwittingly fail his morality tests to his twisted brand of poetic justice. (In this way, he is sort of a proto-Jigsaw.) Wonka, however, would have us believe that the eponymous candyman is actually a very sympathetic and charming lad; a Timothée Chalamet type (played by Timothée Chalamet, no less) with a heart of gold, a mum who loves him so, and dreams of making the world smile with his sugary confections. That is, until … what exactly?

That much is unclear. And the new trailer for the upcoming musical prequel Wonka isn’t offering any hints as to how—to borrow the extremely silly tagline from the trailer—Willy became Wonka. Surely director Paul King, the man who gave us two Paddington movies, has something meaningful up his sleeve here. The cut to Sally Hawking as Wonka’s mom, sobbing tears of pride and joy over her little man, is an obvious indicator that this cinematic treat has a gooey center. There’s also the introduction of Willy Wonka’s friend, Noodle, played by Calah Lane, along with a very pleasant assortment of charming co-stars: Olivia Colman, Keegan-Michael Key, Hugh Grant, Matt Lucas, and Rowan Atkinson. Yep, they even got Mr. Bean.

So what do we know about Willy Wonka after watching this trailer? Well, he’s a young man of very good hair and face who dreams of making the most magical candy the world has ever seen. He didn’t actually steal and enslave an entire race of people from a country originally written by Roald Dahl as being somewhere on the continent of Africa. Only a very terrible man would do something of the sort, and if we know anything about terrible men it’s that Timmy Chalamet could never be one of them. To wit: The Oompa-Loompas came to him, not the other way around. And it was long before he even had working class labor force to lay off. This Willy Wonka also has a (singular) Black friend, so he cannot possibly be racist. Rather than inspiring confidence in his character, this just raises more questions—where did she go? What happened to her? Oh god, are they going to turn Noodle (this is actually her listed name) into the candy factory, like when Solo turned Phoebe Waller Bridge’s android into the Millennium Falcon, transforming the coolest spaceship in cinema history into the most existentially disturbing retcon of all time?

I have questions. And that’s before we even get to the wealthy capitalists, including the one who can’t say “poor” without dry-heaving—which is actually pretty funny. It’s also confusing. If evil capitalists are the villains of Wonka, then what does that make Willy Wonka? He’s not like a regular businessman, he’s a cool businessman? Wonka is clearly the most substantial revision of Dahl’s text, which has been revised both by the author and subsequent publishers in the decades since its initial printing. I’m not precious about Dahl or his stories, so this part doesn’t strike me as odd. But it seems like a really weird choice to overtly pay homage to the 1971 adaptation via the styling of Chalamet and Hugh Grant’s orange-skinned Oompa-Loompa while introducing new narrative elements like Noodle, who is never addressed in Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, nor is she in the sequels or either of the movie adaptations.

Reading GamesRadar’s interview with Paul King doesn’t make me feel particularly optimistic about the introduction of Noodle and her dynamic with Wonka:

Because it’s the story of how you go from a normal person into the Willy Wonka we know, it felt like a good place to start with him as being very kind-hearted, very open-hearted. He needed a slightly more cynical person to show him the truth of the world, that not everyone is lovely, fluffy, and nice, and that bad things happen along the way. [Noodle] felt like a very good counterpart to him and I was really just interested in their friendship. Calah Lane is wonderful, and she’s able to encapsulate this wise, ‘old head on young shoulders’ kind of character. 

Not only does that read like a rehash of an exhausted racist trope, but it seems like Wonka’s character growth is dependent upon the lived experience and relative wisdom of a young Black woman. I’ll give King and this Wonka prequel the benefit of the doubt on the Noodle front until I see this movie (after heavily dosing myself with an edible), but that quote is concerning.

Of course, the biggest question Wonka raises is what the hell happened to Willy Wonka to turn him into the paranoid, narcissistic, reclusive millionaire who punishes (and maybe even murders) children for misbehaving? In both Dahl’s book and the 1971 film starring Gene Wilder, Wonka fires all the factory workers because his business rivals sent spies to steal his sugary secrets—which is why he “employs” Oompa-Loompas. (In Tim Burton’s nightmarish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka’s origin story involves a grumpy dentist father who forbade him from eating candy—wah!) This pathologizing of Wonka makes a certain amount of narrative sense, especially through Wilder’s portrayal, which emphasizes his insecurities and pettiness.

I’m just having a hard time reconciling Chalamet’s cute lil Wonka with the rich old jerk he becomes, when that character has already been made so indelible in pop culture. You just cannot convince me that this Willy Wonka is the same guy. Surely it isn’t just the cruel machinery of capitalism and rival businesses stealing trade secrets that turns him into a shithead, right? There must be something else going on here, and it has to be really bad to justify a complete heel turn.

Honestly, the idea that Wonka might have a bonkers nihilistic twist is the most exciting thing about it.

(featured image: Warner Bros.)