Wonka … Is Pretty Good?

Timothée Chalamet is the worst part of Wonka, which isn’t to say that he’s bad in the movie — just hesitant, like he’s working in an idiom that doesn’t come naturally to him, which is odd. Dig up any of the videos from his pre-fame days at La Guardia High School and it would seem indisputable that there’s a theater kid lurking within Hollywood’s current crown prince. But when actually called upon to sing and dance while wearing a magenta velvet frock coat and top hat, Chalamet displays the tentativeness of someone who only recently emerged from the prelapsarian bliss of childhood into an adolescent’s awareness of the possibility of being embarrassed. Even when he’s belting out an opening number that takes place on a ship and isn’t not reminiscent of “A Piece of Sky” from Yentl, he can’t summon the arms-outstretched abandon the part demands. His isn’t the kind of voice that would effortlessly resonate off the back wall of a 1,200-seat theater, but it isn’t a bad one, either — he just doesn’t commit.