There are some acting careers that are defined by a single role. Some of them are because the actor didn’t stick around in the business long enough to establish themselves as more than a “that guy.” More often, they develop an IMDB laundry list of thankless background and supporting roles. Seldom are the kinds of actors that manage to overstep the shadow of their keystone performance. Gene Wilder was one of the few to do so.

I’m not sure that I can lump him in with actors such as Robert Englund or Michael Berryman (Just after the first anniversary of his death, Wes Craven must still be on the mind.) in the sense that he is seen by most to be one character. (I’m speaking, of course, of Willy Wonka.) Most people think of Gene Wilder as Gene Wilder, and he just happens to give one of the most memorable performances ever in a lucrative acting career. It’s no secret that Gene Wilder worked on famous movies such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein with Mel Brooks (the last of which he co-wrote). He also paired up with stand-up legend Richard Pryor for a series of buddy comedies (whereas I’ve only recently caught up with a few of his Brooks collaborations, I grew up on the Pryor/Wilder cross-overs). He managed to find the perfect balance of being an actor who can adapt to a role while retaining what it is about him that makes us look forward to seeing his movies.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is one of those movies I don’t remember ever being exposed to. It’s just a movie I’ve always known. I remember enjoying it as a young kid, as well as the Roald Dahl book which was read aloud in class for a few subsequent years in my elementary days. As I grew up, it became an oddity, a strange hybrid of childish and adult things that didn’t quite compute. It wasn’t until near my junior year of high school that I revisited the movie, after seeing how much the movie inspired other interests I had at the time (and a lengthy discussion about its parallels with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness). The crazy thing was how well it held up. It challenged how I look not just at family entertainment, but art as a whole. It was a film that could entertain children, but it grew up with the audience. It is not the same film as a seventeen year old that it was as a seven year old. The dialogue was wittier, the fantasy stranger. Today, I can hardly fathom that I was watching a movie that quoted Keats and Shakespeare. The sets (which would never be attempted today) hold up, while the CGI landscape of Tim Burton’s adaptation were dated less than one calendar year after its release.

At the center of it all was Willy Wonka, a character almost impossible to pin. He was serious yet ironic in the same way many view The Joker. He starts a lottery for children (a questionable move in its own right) and then tests them under extreme situations to find a successor. He’s a genius and a madman. Perhaps his best scenes in the movie are probably Wonka’s first entrance, when he walks out with the cane and fools the audience, tricking both the audience in the film as well as the audience watching the film. At first he appears as an elderly man, slow and frail. He appears to fall, but catches himself in a cartwheel ending in a bow. The scene defines the character before he speaks a single word. He appears to be an adult, but is also a child, both an entrepreneur and an entertainer. I’ve read that Wilder said he would not agree to the film without this scene, because from that point on, the audience would not trust the character. The other contender is when Charlie and Grandpa Joe storm into Wonka’s office to confront him near the end of the movie. Contrary to everything we have seen before, this is Wonka in a (seemingly) private setting. His office, so far as the audience is aware, was not decorated for guests. It is the ruins of a man literally torn in half, and everything inside of it reflects that. The clock, his desk, the mannequin head which he rests his hat upon. It’s a not-so-subtle (but somehow still apt) realization of how conflicted we become as we grow up, especially the archetypal artist.

My personal favorite scene, though, is the film’s last, with the famous glass elevator (which the source material’s sequel was titled after). What stood out to me as a child was the moment where Charlie and Grandpa Joe (who I always saw as an avatar for my own grandfather...who probably has more in common with Wonka than he does Joe) point out that they can see their house, and the school Charlie attends from their position in the sky. Something about that detail humanizes the whole concept, it grounds the scene, if you will. It was later on that I read Wilder’s notes on how Wonka’s attire should look and learned not just how much he knew about class, but also how involved he was in the realization of his characters. (He was also a master of criticism, blending positivity with construction in lines such as, “The hat is terrific, but making it 2 inches shorter would make it more special.”) Without discrediting the director, crew, or the rest of the cast, Wilder understood how important these details are, and how they can make a movie come to life.

Here is another obvious allusion, with Wonka prompting Charlie, an impoverished boy, to break through a glass ceiling. Shortly after doing so, he offers Charlie a job as the new owner of the Wonka factory. Not only this, but whereas most successful individuals must sacrifice family (as in, time with family...not a literal sacrifice), Wonka permits Charlie’s entire family to live inside the factory. He gets to live his dream without leaving his family behind, something that just about everybody strives for. The difference is, though, that Gene Wilder seems to have lived such a dream, judging from his family’s accounts of his last years and the outpour of praise from those he has worked with. Just like in the movie, when Wonka discloses to Charlie that he is only getting older and he will need someone to keep the factory running, we are all now Charlies and have to keep the dream factory in production.