Classic Movie Review: 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Directed by Mel Stuart

Written by Roald Dahl

Starring Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum, Roy Kinnear

Release Date June 30th, 1971

Published December 15th, 2023

"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams" Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The wrong man named Gene won the Oscar for Best Actor at the 44th Academy Awards. Heck, the wrong man named Gene was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Gene Hackman was the wrong Gene, rewarded for his okay but not spectacular performance as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. The right Gene was Gene Wilder, the star of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Somehow, Wilder didn't even merit a nomination and that itself is crime enough. No actor eligible for Best Actor at the 44th Academy Awards delivered the kind of nuanced, strange, and funny performance that Wilder did in Mel Stuart and Roald Dahl's visionary cautionary tale.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory opens with loads of exposition. We meet Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a poor kid who can't partake in the ludicrous and excessive opening number dedicated to a candy man who appears to give away as much candy as he sells. As this candy retailer regales the kids with the wonders of one Willy Wonka, the greatest chocolatier in the world, Charlie Bucket watches from the outside looking in. He can't stick around or go in as he has to get to work, delivering newspapers and making just enough money to provide a loaf of bread for his family, including his hard-working mother, and his four layabout grandparents. I'm kidding, I'm sure that Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) and the rest of the grandparents laid up in a bed in the middle of the Bucket home are there for a good reason, being very, very old.

The plot of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory kicks in when it's announced that the reclusive Willy Wonka has started up his factory again and will open the factory to a group of people who win a contest. The contest involves buying chocolate bars and finding the five Wonka Bars that have a golden ticket inside. After an exhaustive introduction to four winners of the contest, four specifically spoiled rotten little kids, we will watch as Charlie Bucket somehow gets his hands on the final golden ticket and the chance to tour the Chocolate Factory and win a lifetime supply of chocolate.

Until Wilder comes on screen, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is fine, it's a little overwrought and the children are deeply irritating, but once Gene Wilder is on screen, the movie takes on an entirely new comic energy. Wilder is wildly alive and unique. His wild hair and that wonderful mischievous gleam in his eye charge the movie with a new level of excitement. Every line delivered by Wilder is rich with humor, subtext, smarts, and preternatural sarcasm that only he and the audience can fully understand or grasp. Watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I feel like I have witnessed the keystone of all Gen-X humor.

Gen-X humor is defined by a disaffected sarcasm that becomes so deeply ingrained that it circles back on itself, eventually becoming an earnest appreciation. There is a brilliant Simpson's Gag where one Gen-X kid says to another "Are you being sarcastic, dude?" and his friend replies with a somber and confused, "I don't even know anymore." That's Gen-X wrapped up in a 10 second exchange of dialogue. But how did Gen-X become the sarcasm generation? I think Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka is the reason. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory arrived right at the birth of Gen-X, just as many were developing their personality. It became iconic and a tradition for Gen-X kids to pass on to each other.

We wanted to be like Willy Wonka. We wanted to be the most clever, funny, and inaccessible person on the planet. Watching Willy Wonka punish the rich and privileged that we all carried a healthy disdain for, made him our hero and in his non-sequitur asides, and that disaffected sarcasm as he watched the bad eggs of the world seal their own fate, Willy Wonka invented the Gen-X accent, the Gen-X manner, and the overall attitude of Generation X. Now, younger readers, I know you, you're sarcastic too, and you are the ones who turned Wilder's Willy into a meme, but we had to carry Gene's spirt in our mind for years before he became the great exemplar of the world of Top Text-Bottom Text.

Perhaps the reason Gene Wilder did not win, and was not even nominated for, an Academy Award was because he was simply too far ahead of his time. Wilder's Willy Wonka belonged in the 1990s. But without him in 1971, I can imagine that the 1990's would not be what it was without Wilder's Willy. Being far too ahead of his time, Wilder's Willy Wonka would have to wait until years later for people to recognize his true genius and the vast and thorough influence he had on an entire generation who would take his sarcasm, his obscure genius, and his eventual earnest joy and base their entire personality around it.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the classic on the next I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast. Myself and my co-hosts Bob Zerull and Jeff Lassiter are pairing this classic film with its brand new contemporary partner, Wonka starring Timothy Chalamet. The new film is quite different from the original but in a similar way, it reflects the generation coming of age just as it is being released. We will expand on this idea and many others on the I Hate Critics Podcast which you can hear wherever you listen to podcasts.

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