Sweets for the Sweet: “Wonka”

Timothée Chalamet, all of 28 years old, has certainly been around. In 2017, barely 21, he rose to international fame as a lovestruck Italian teenager discovering his gender preference in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. The role brought him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, along with a raft of other honors, while he was also being feted as the “cool” boy who deflowers Saoirse Ronan’s character in Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig..

 He has also portrayed a drug addict (Beautiful Boy, 2018), a young cannibal (Bones and All, 2022), a revolutionary student (in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, 2021), and—just for variety—the handsome young love interest in Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women (2019)  Very soon audiences will be able to see him as heroic Paul Atreides in Part II of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the science fiction classic, Dune.

 But at the moment he’s busy making chocolate. I’m talking about his starring role in the prequel to everyone’s childhood favorite, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). I suspect many of us have fond memories of Gene Wilder playing a mature Willy with bright blue eyes, flyaway hair, and an impish sense of humor. (And I suspect most of us were turned off by Johnny Depp’s more sinister approach in 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which bears the name of Roald Dahl’s original novel.)  Movie franchises being what they are, it wasn’t surprising that someone would decide the tale of Charlie Bucket’s visit to the Wonka factory required a prequel. And so we get to find out, via Chalamet’s performance, just how the young Willy founded that amazing factory in the first place.

 Roald Dahl, of course, was famous for being curmudgeonly. A specialist in creating monsters of various odious sorts, he tempered his sweet story about the magic of chocolate with some very sour characters. The new Wonka does something of the same, with none other that Olivia Colman playing an evil landlady who keeps Willy and a clutch of other unfortunates in thrall, once they’ve had the misfortune of spending a night in her seedy hotel. Her sardonic gloating over her victims is something of which I suspect Dahl would approve. I’m much less sure he would have liked the treacle in the story, like Willy regarding chocolate-making as the legacy passed down to him by his dear, departed mother.  (She’s played in several brief scenes by Sally Hawkins, always a genuinely delightful performer with a heartbreaking smile—but here asked to be part of a saccharine moment of magical beyond-the-grave reunion.)

 The  new film  benefits from lots of fizzy and phantasmagoric visuals (oh, that giraffe!), in a charming European setting. I’m not sure, though, that it needed to be a musical. The various pleasant but not memorable songs (sung well enough by Chalamet and others) simply make a longish film longer. There’s also lots of time spent on building the backstories of some of the lesser characters. A writer of my acquaintance wonders why, in today’s cinema, we can’t simply accept quirky characters for who they are, without giving them all past lives that might possibly lead to sequels, thus broadening the Wonka Universe. This comment made me think of a film with some similarities, Chocolat. In it, the past life of wandering candy-maker Juliette Binoche is left mysterious, and we’re none the worse for that.

 I can’t say enough, though, about Hugh Grant’s role as the drollest of Oompa-Loompas. Now that he’s too old for romantic roles, he’s sure enjoying letting his freak flag fly.

 

The Four Little Women and How They Grew

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” So Little Women begins on the page, and so previous screen versions have always begun: with the four March sisters lamenting the poverty they face while their father is off in the Civil War. One striking feature of Greta Gerwig’s new version is that it dares to break the mold and play with the book’s chronology.

Growing up I was a serious Louisa May Alcott fan. I read most of Alcott’s novels, which fall into the category you could call 19^th century YA, and I later persuaded my kids (yes, my son as well as my daughter) to enjoy Little Women, as I had. More recently I’ve read Alcott biographies, and also the fictional March (about the Civil War escapades of Jo’s father), plus Anne Boyd Rioux’s scholarly Meg, Jo,Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. So I guess you could call me a true believer.

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As such I’ve always been partial to the 1933 George Cukor screen adaptation, at least to Jo as portrayed by Katharine Hepburn. Alcott’s original description of Jo, her own literary alter ego, was that she was “tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way.” No other Jo in my memory comes so close to this physical description as Hepburn, and her striking combination of awkwardness, intelligence, and occasional pig-headedness makes her my nostalgic favorite. The 1949 musical version features, alas, June Allyson warbling about being “the man of the family now that Papa is away from home.” Allyson is just too cute and perky to be my Jo. In this iteration, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Janet Leigh makes a conventionally pretty Meg, Margaret O’Brien an appropriately fragile Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor  an extremely unlikely Amy, overgrown and wearing a distracting blonde wig. (Yikes!)

Hollywood then left the story alone until 1994, when an actual female director, Gillian Armstrong, took it on. Her version, much loved by many women I know, conveys a nice warm sense of family, presided over by a glowing Marmee (the mother character) in the person of Susan Sarandon. I’ve admired the young Claire Danes as Beth and the even younger Kirsten Dunst as a perfect snip of an Amy, though at 12 she could not play Amy’s later scenes and had to be replaced by Samantha Mathis. It all looks gorgeous but I just can’t accept Winona Ryder: too petite and too pretty to ever be awkward, intense Jo.

Greta Gerwig had the bright idea of focusing on Jo’s literary aspirations by starting the film near the story’s end, with Jo living in New York as a fledgling writer. Gerwig’s structure is complex, moving us back and forth in time. Uniquely, she focuses on a Jo who genuinely spurns marriage in favor of a career. How does she handle the fact that Alcott’s Jo does indeed fall in love and get married? There’s a clever twist I don’t think it’s fair to fully disclose; suffice it to say that this is the most “meta” of Little Women adaptations, so that the Jo we meet is in many ways Alcott herself, adapting her family’s story for popular consumption. Other virtues: Laura Dern’s Marmee and Florence Pugh’s Amy are far more complex than usual; Meryl Streep is a hoot as stern Aunt March; and Saoirse Ronan’s uninhibited romping with the boy-next-door, Timothée Chalamet, captures a delightfully warm relationship that  she cannot allow to ripen into love.

Lady Bird, Lady Bird, Fly Away From Home

No, I’ve never lived in Sacramento, nor did I attend a Roman Catholic girls’ high school. (As if!) Still, Lady Bird scored with me as it’s been scoring with audiences everywhere because it contains the ring of truth. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is not fancy filmmaking, technically speaking. But it’s wonderfully secure in its handling of actors who are far more three-dimensional than the comic-book cut-outs we’re using to seeing at the movies.

Gerwig is a rising young actress, known for her appearance in 20^th Century Women and the title role in Frances Ha (for which she co-wrote the screenplay with then-beau Noah Baumbach). Though she grew up in Sacramento, California and attended the all-girl St. Francis High School, she has insisted that the rambunctious, rebellious lead character in Lady Bird is not a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Still, it’s clear from her conversation with host Peter Sagal on my favorite radio quiz show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, that the line between Lady Bird and the seventeen-year-old Greta is a blurry one. Gerwig describes her younger self as much more mild-mannered and well-behaved than Lady Bird. In the course of a fight with her mother, Greta certainly never jumped out of a moving car. (In her case, the car was only idling.) It’s true, though, that she and her mom waged epic battles, which ended as quickly as they started, because beneath it all they felt an intense love for one another.

Actors who move into the director’s chair tend to be especially adept at gathering terrific casts. Gerwig has certainly done that here. Her leading lady is Saoirse Ronan, the gifted young (23-year-old) Irish actress who nabbed a supporting actress Oscar nomination (for Atonement) when she was just thirteen. Adept at accents and at complex characterizations, Ronan finally played an Irish lass not far removed from her own age and personality type in 2015’s Brooklyn, for which she was deservedly named a best actress nominee. Oscar will probably single her out again this year for her unforgettable high-schooler in Lady Bird. Before I saw the film, I assumed she’d be playing the school rebel, someone abrasive and angry, a regular flame-thrower. Well, yes, but Christine McPherson (who insists Lady Bird is her given name, because she gave it to herself) can also be soft, vulnerable, and unexpectedly sweet.

 

Lady Bird is attracted to two very different high school boys, played by rising stars Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) and Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name),with unpredictable results. She has a chunky best friend who gets good grades; then there’s the richer, cooler girl she aspires to be. She adores her warm-hearted sad sack of a father, played by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts. But her most complex emotions are directed toward her mother, Marion, played by Broadway actress Laurie Metcalf in a performance that pundits are saying is ripe for Oscar love. Marion is very much at the heart of the McPherson family: she’s hard-working, practical, and a great friend to those in need. As keeper of the family’s finances, she’s tight with a dollar, so of course she has no use for Lady Bird’s dream of getting out of Sacramento (which she deems the boring mid-west of California) and heading for a pricey east coast college. Nor do the two agree about clothes or about pretty much anything else. Still, the love is there, bubbling up when least expected.

Lady Bird is a small movie that makes the most of what it’s got. To which I say Hallelujah, and Amen.