4. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005)
If you haven’t already done so, you can now start writing your juicy hate comments: How could I possibly choose this smirky travesty of a Roald Dahl fairy tale, with its fey and flippant performance by Johnny Depp as the beloved Willy Wonka, as Burton’s fourth best movie? Here’s how. The movie is a very different box of chocolates from the 1971 version — not that that should stand in the way of one’s appreciation for the late Gene Wilder’s creepy cuddliness as Willy Wonka. Yet the movie that surrounded Wilder was (let’s be honest) a rather chintzy piece of musical Tinker-Toy. Burton, in his far more authentic adaptation, cuts to the story-book soul of Dahl’s 1964 novel. He envisions the chocolate factory as a confectionary dream zone, ruled by disarmingly funny figments of dementia like the all-singing, all-melting puppets that herald the candymaker’s arrival. The children — updated versions of Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, etc. — seem even more timely in an age when it’s become politically correct to spoil kids rotten. So it makes perfect sense that Wonka, played by Johnny Depp as a milky-skinned misanthropic dandy who looks and acts like a vampire who’s halfway through transitioning, despises both the children and their parents (except, of course, for Charlie, the one kid on screen who hasn’t fallen from grace). Willy is a sourball, and a hilarious one, yet the mystery of Wonka is that he crafts the most succulent candies for the people he hates. Burton’s film is a bittersweet homage to our whole relationship to candy and pleasure: Why it’s important to love it, and just as important not to love it too much.
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