Me & the chocolate factory

"Willy Wonka" was made long before the era of special effects replaced character development as the top priority in Hollywood. And yet the factory itself, from the chocolate waterfall to the lickable wallpaper, still feels utterly convincing. I've spent years dreaming about the dainty teacup that Wonka sips from, then bites into.

Then there is Gene Wilder, who plays Wonka as a wild-haired eccentric. It would be impossible to convey the brilliance of Wilder's performance on paper. So much of it resides in body language, inflection, facial expressions. But I should mention that it did not occur to me, until I saw "Young Frankenstein" a few years later, that Gene Wilder was merely an actor playing the part of Willy Wonka; I thought Wonka was an actual person.

Wilder's charm derives from a curious blend of lunacy and insight. He mutters strange asides in foreign languages, quotes Shakespeare, and bursts into manic fits of rage. In what is no doubt the creepiest scene this side of "The Shining," Wonka takes his charges on his custom-designed paddleboat, the Wonkatania. Wonka steers into a dark tunnel. The score grows menacing. Soon, huge, disturbing images are flashing on the walls -- a worm crawling across a man's neck, a chicken decapitated with a cleaver. The children are terrified, which seems to be the whole point. Rather than comforting them, Wonka begins to recite Blakeian couplets, his voice building to an apoplectic screech, while colored lights scroll across his face.

There's no earthly way of knowing
which direction we are going ...
Not a speck of light is showing ...
Is the grisly reaper mowing?

This scene scared me witless as a kid (it still does). But I found it strangely exhilarating also, a revelation of the anarchic danger of our fantasy life.

This is Wonka's whole thing: He honors the imaginative capacities of childhood without kowtowing to its solipsism. I am thinking of the moment when, confronted by a whinging Veruca Salt, he stares into her eyes and whispers reverently, "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams."

Wonka is fabulously unfazed when, one after another, the kids break the rules and suffer ignominious fates. Augustus Gloop, for instance, topples into the chocolate river and is sucked into a giant pneumatic tube and sent hurtling toward the fudge room. Wonka knows these kids are completely out of control -- doomed by their own indulgences. By the end, the only one left is Charlie Bucket, to whom he bestows the chocolate factory.

As a kid, I wanted desperately to be Charlie, to be that good, that pure of heart. I wanted to be the kid who resisted his own cruel and selfish impulses and lived happily ever after. I don't mind telling you that I still tear up at the end of the movie.

Most of all, I wanted to be the kid who won an entire chocolate factory. I was obsessed with this idea, and it dogged me into adulthood. I recently wrote a whole book about candy, expressly so I could get myself inside a few small factories.

The great unsung irony of the original "Willy Wonka" is that it was funded by the Quaker Oats Company, which hoped to put out a Wonka bar. The money people, in other words, saw the film as a promotional vehicle. But the candy bar never made it to market.

As for the new film, it has been accompanied by the expected cavalcade of product tie-ins, the most intriguing of which (to me, anyway) is the Wonka Donutz bar, a ring-shaped chocolate thing speckled with colored nonpareils. It takes some getting used to; it contains a ganache-like chocolate filling inside a milk chocolate shell, and these two elements, along with the crunchy nonpareils, created a kind of textural triple whammy.

But the Donutz bar should do just fine. So will the new film. Still, all of this poses a more basic question: Why remake a masterpiece? Does the world truly need Johnny Depp done up as Michael Jackson, defiling the memory of Gene Wilder? Does it need to tally the candy-coated thrills $50 million in CGI technology can buy?

"Everybody has had one and one is enough for anybody," Wonka tells the greedy children who demand a second Everlasting Gobstopper.

My point exactly.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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