Wonka · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man in a plum coat walks into a cobbled square with nothing in his pockets, and the square starts to move. The crowd, the props, the light, the whole dish of the place tips into step, and Chung Chung-hoon's camera climbs a crane to watch it happen. Paul King had been building toward that shot since the first Paddington. What's odd is that by 2023 almost nobody else was building toward it at all.

Look again at who's dancing. Wonka isn't driving the square. The square is carrying him.

Deleuze noticed this in the American musical and gave it a name: the movement of world. Normally a character moves through a world that stays put. He crosses the room; the room does nothing. In a number that reverses. The dancer's own effort thins out and a larger motion takes over, one belonging to the street and the furniture and the crowd, and the dancer becomes the place where it passes through rather than the thing producing it. Deleuze took this to be the musical's real discovery, not a decorative flourish.

It happens to be the exact shape of Wonka's hero. He arrives broke. Almost immediately Mrs Scrubitt has signed him into debt-servitude in her laundry-house, and a cartel of chocolatiers has the city's shops sewn up with a bribed police chief holding the line. He cannot win any of that by force. No money, no premises. What he has is a capacity to make the world move around him, and King builds the numbers to prove it: environment, props and crowd become the choreography. That isn't a staging preference. It's the film's argument about its own protagonist, put into the grammar instead of the dialogue.

Under the numbers runs a machine Deleuze called the action-image in its large form. A situation encompasses everyone. He named that encompassing milieu the synsign. The situation presses, someone acts, the situation changes. Nathan Crowley's city is the encompasser and it's built to press: cobbles, a cathedral, an oppressive laundry-house, every space organized by somebody's greed. Wonka perceives it and acts on it, force against force, which is as clean a binomial as the form allows.

Here's why that's stranger than it sounds. Deleuze's central historical claim is that this machine broke after the war. Neorealism and everything downstream of it produced characters who see too much and can do nothing with what they see. People who watch, wander, endure. He called it the crisis of the action-image, and serious cinema has mostly lived on the far side of it ever since. Wonka walks back across the line on purpose and rebuilds the pre-crisis engine to spec, at studio scale, with a straight face. Treat it as a reconstruction rather than a throwback and the craft decisions start lining up.

Bazin supplies the reason the reconstruction holds. His rule about forbidden montage was that when the whole point of a scene is that two things really shared a space, you aren't allowed to cut them apart, because the cut proves nothing. Mark Everson's editing obeys that instinct: hold wide enough for staging and dance to read as one continuous event, then punctuate with closer inserts on an invention or a reaction. King uses visual effects to extend and sweeten, not to replace. A number only lifts if you believe the bodies were there.

The film also has a darker seam, and it's the reason none of this curdles. Rowan Atkinson's cleric is a chocolate addict. Keegan-Michael Key's police chief is corrupted by chocolate, and it shows on him. Deleuze would call chocolate here a fetish in the strict sense: a part-object charged with compulsive force, the thing an appetite organizes itself around. Under the fairy-tale city is a world of pure drive. Hunger, hoarding, bodies going soft. The villains are greedy in a way you can see on their bodies. Dahl always wrote this way, and King keeps it, which is what lets the sweetness stay un-ironic. The film knows what chocolate does to people.

Chocolate does one further job. It is the film's symbol in Deleuze's sense, the object that condenses the whole organizing relation. Given away, it makes a square dance. Hoarded and price-fixed, it makes a cartel. Every turn of the plot is a version of that single difference.

The visual system does steady, legible work around it. Chung Chung-hoon comes from Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) and brings saturated, controlled colour into a candy palette, where a colour absorbs a scene and becomes its feeling: plum for Wonka, luxuriant tailoring for the cartel, Lindy Hemming's costumes functioning as a moral chart you can read at a glance. The frontal symmetry and storybook framing come straight from the Paddington films' dollhouse cross-sections, scaled up to a city. In a movement-image film the frame is a closed set you read for information — who has the upper hand, who's about to move. King composes his to be legible at speed by a seven-year-old.

The washhouse captives are the best formal idea in the film after the numbers themselves. A crowd rendered as one feeling-unit, what Deleuze calls a dividual: they suffer together, sing together, break out together. It's lifted honestly from Oliver!, whose massed street choreography and orphan-underdog plotting sit directly behind Noodle and the laundry-house. King doesn't hide any of his debts. Mary Poppins supplies the founding blueprint, a magical outsider who changes a grey city by singing at it, and its rooftop chimney-sweep staging is the direct ancestor of these crane-tracked street ensembles. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang matters more than people give it credit for: Dahl co-scripted it, and it's the template for a practical-effects family musical organized around fantastical inventions, with songs staged as set pieces rather than bolted onto a plot. Paddington 2 is the immediate parent, same director, same co-writer in Simon Farnaby, same editor, its prison sequence rebuilt as the washhouse and its community-of-outcasts structure carried over whole.

Then there's the oddest thing in the picture, which is a matter of time. When Wonka reprises "Pure Imagination," the song is arriving from 1971, from a film that is this boy's future and our past. Flashbacks don't normally work that way. Sally Hawkins as his mother is the ordinary kind, a dated recollection-image supplying the why behind everything he does. The song is something else: a memory of a film that hasn't happened yet. And the prequel form does something real to the action-image. The large form promises a situation transformed by a decisive act, but we already know where this boy ends up, so the suspense drains out and the destination becomes the payload instead. King turns most of that limit into feeling. Whether he earns all of it is worth arguing about.

So what did it do to film? It didn't invent an image. What it did was demonstrate, at well over $600 million, that the pre-crisis machine still runs: a built, practically staged, un-ironic integrated musical could work at scale in a decade that had written the form off outside animation. King's own invention is smaller and more exact than that. The joke and the feeling land on the same beat, instead of the joke arriving to undercut the feeling. He worked it out across the Paddington films, and it's the thing that lets an earnest movie survive an ironic audience.

Next time, watch the numbers for who is actually moving. Ask when Wonka ever changes anything by strength. He doesn't, not once, and the film has an argument about why.