Wonka (2023); TV: The Crown Season 6, Part II (2023)
Timothée Chalamet sings and dances. The embattled Windsors show some class.
Timothée Chalamet is the brash chocolatier trying to crash into the confection business
Wonka (2023)
In theaters
The light touch is just the right touch for a castles-in-the-air fairy tale, which director Paul J. King’s musical Wonka abundantly proves. The story of a penniless chocolatier determined to heal the world through his confections lives or dies on whimsy.
The role has been taken on in earlier movies by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp; all three movies draw on Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. But here King and co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby have decided to tell Willy’s origin story.
To put a fresh, innocent Willy on screen, King said he needed a lead actor who’d enchant the characters in the story, and also sing and dance so breezily the audience would fall under his spell, too.
To pull off this abracadabra, King cast Timothée Chalamet largely because of the gleeful smack of the rap videos the star made back when he was a student actor.
Does his propulsive freeform improvising in those videos suggest he has enough juice to sustain a lead role in a musical? So far on screen, Chalamet has ranged from the intensely personal (Call Me by Your Name, 2017) to the grandly epic (Dune Part I, 2022).
Here he’s working in a range that’s new to him. A fleet-footed master of magic. Early on we see how in childhood Willy’s mother (Sally Hawkins) endowed him with a fascination for chocolate and the inclusive happiness it could bring.
Now an orphan, he’s determined to make it as a chocolatier on a grand scale in the big city, this one a hazy early twentieth century metropolis patterned after late 19th century London. Big bad wolves are waiting to ensnare and crush a young naif.
First there’s his greedily underhanded landlady Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman). She tricks Willy into signing a contract whose fine print he neglects to read. It charges more for his lodging than he can ever pay.
Five other residents have also been snookered, and they’re all prisoners in the Scrubbit basement laundry, washing and ironing clothes, never allowed above ground. Willy is forced to join them.
With the help of one young inmate named – gag – Noodle (Calah Lane), Willy makes his way to the surface, and from his magic suitcase concocts his own brand of chocolate that not only delights passersby but has them floating on air.
Noodle (Calah Lane) and Willy join forces to free themselves and bring chocolate to the world
Looking on from the second story of their ornately windowed emporia are the three lions of the chocolate business who’ve cornered the market and won’t let this kid with his powers of magical production muscle in.
They plot to kill him off, but of course they’ve underestimated Willy. He foils their deadly scheme and returns to join his fellow underground captives who help him outmaneuver the cruel capitalists.
I haven’t read Dahl’s story, so I don’t know how much here is taken from his work or newly written by the scriptwriters. Regardless, the movie is a vibrant pleasure to watch.
Chalamet as Willy has a light baritone which he wisely never strains, and the choreography for him manages to suggest magical force without unduly complicating his steps.
The production numbers are brought off on an impressive scale, the visual effects are exceedingly bright and smoothly executed. There’s a balloon-lifted flight over the city that’s truly enchanting.
The music is buoyant enough to keep us rooting for Willy and his newfound friends. And the comical choreography doesn’t make fun of the characters. They grin under Willy’s spell.
Mrs. Scrubbit and the three wicked chocolate moguls sneer and hiss amusingly, with a whiff of Dickensian creepiness. Willy’s blameless companion prisoners feel unfairly treated, and Mrs. Scrubbit and the three moguls give off enough nastiness to make their comeuppance fully justified.
The sets and costumes are delightfully over-stylized and gingerbready, and happily don’t feel too stickily Disneyfied.
The story’s darker undertones eventually make it to the surface and frighten as they should. When the moguls try to eliminate Willy, we see their murderous scheme for what it is.
For all the immaculate design and nicely detailed performances, what pulled me through was Chalamet as Willy. He has a light tenor voice which he wisely never strains, and the choreography for him manages to suggest magical force without unduly complicating his steps.
He doesn’t push his circumspect dancing, those long legs, too far. He’s exuberant but never awkward.
As much fun as it is to watch him as a cut-up, the neatest gesture he pulls off comes in a number, “A World of Your Own”, where he does less rather than more. In keeping his talent in bounds, he suggests the possible makings of a full-fledged singer-dancer. It will be fun to see how he builds on this performance in his next musical.
Imelda Staunton brings the series’ panoramic vision of Queen Elizabeth II to a tender close
The Crown Season 6, Part II (2023)
Streaming on Netflix
The British royal family has gotten deluxe treatment and been roundly ridiculed for six seasons of The Crown. Given its rich, impeccably researched production design, lustrous cinematography and sensitive, surprisingly witty writing, the series producers can lay claim to creating a television classic.
True, some viewers came to decry it as soap opera, and the shifts between monarchical dignity and entitled shenanigans could be dizzying.
Yet the drubbing hasn’t knocked the show off its game. Anti-monarchists were lying in wait for it from the start, so a wide audience was never guaranteed. Yet audiences have largely hung in, for two reasons.
First, it’s gorgeous, suggesting a palatial splendor hardly any of us could fully imagine. How did things look – gilded doors, plush furnishings, fine china and bowing servants – behind those palace walls? The truth is this is the first broad set of clues we’ve ever gotten of how a monarchical space feels to those inside.
The other reason it kept most of its audience enthralled was a cast stacked with actors who took on the grandeur with a fierce seriousness, making royal households feel both cushy and forbidding. Royalty, we learned, can make royals look small even to themselves.
The producers, headed by creator and chief writer Peter Morgan, took on the challenge of making palaces, gold carriages, clothing sewn and tailored as if to be worn for generations – and some of it was – all feel like a giant entrapment device.
There’s literally nowhere to go from the lot you were born, or have breath-catchingly married, into.
Staunton’s gravity and mourning for what the Queen has missed have never been as poignant as in these concluding episodes, and her commanding work is sweetly set off with appearances, not in the least ghostly, by her former selves, again portrayed by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman.
In Part II’s six episodes, spanning the late ’90s to 2005, we’re brought closer to our own time, and it’s not surprising that emotions grow rawer and more familiar. The Queen (Imelda Staunton) feels the institution losing its hold on the public and struggles to halt the erosion.
No question the place needs work. Recovering From the Death of Diana is a major theme. Charles (Dominic West) can’t get a break from William (Ed McVey) and Harry (Luther Ford), who feel him still betraying the mother so cruelly snatched from them.
Yet Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) is able to show William he’s not just angry at his father but deeper down – a common grieving fallacy – angry at Diana, the beloved mother who, to some degree carelessly, left him. Pryce delivers his most finely shaded scenes.
Ed McVey finds the right blend of bewilderment and duty as the conflicted Prince William
The handsome William is hounded by the press and mobs of screaming teenage girls, and he and Harry reveal a rivalry that never seems to cool down. (We now know it’s going to last.)
The rise of Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) as a modernizing Prime Minister focuses the Windsors on what they do best, symbolizing a pride the British public can aspire to without, as a politician must, pleading for anything (polls still show that most Brits don’t resent the taxes they pay to sustain the monarchy).
Charles and Camilla (Olivia Williams) are finally allowed to marry, after a 30-year postponement. Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville, who like Pryce does her best work in the closing episodes) ends her madcap life suffering a series of debilitating strokes, cutting the Queen off from one more link to her past.
As Elizabeth approaches her Golden Jubilee, marking 50 years on the throne, she considers stepping down but instead gives a warm, funny speech at Charles and Camilla’s wedding signaling to the world that she’s not going anywhere.
Staunton’s gravity and mourning for what the Queen has missed have never been as poignant as in these concluding episodes, and her commanding work is sweetly set off with appearances, not in the least ghostly, by her former selves, again portrayed by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman.
Elizabeth’s past selves not only bolster her, but still live inside her, both refining and lightening her load. This is one tough woman. The Crown may be more than the person who wears it, but unless someone puts it on and bends to the task of keeping it meaningful, it’s just a hunk of exquisite jewels, sumptuous silk and precious metal.
This final season makes it clearer than ever that frail human beings live under it. They have to not just wear it but bear it. The pay’s good but the price is high.
An ardent fan of The Crown, I must say, I am reluctant about the final season (something to do with the Monarchy's exploits in the last few years) . But will definitely watch it. For Imelda and Jonathan mostly.
Your writing is always excellent - but these two I want to see! (I'll be joining Netflix to catch Maestro as well.)