When Gene Wilder Played God (in a Chocolate Factory)

The Inscrutable Master

Charlie gets one of those five golden tickets, and he and Grandpa Joe join four other lucky kids and their guardians on a tour of Willy Wonka’s heavenly candy factory. It’s a land where chocolate runs in rivers and almost everything is edible. But as wondrous as Willy Wonka’s factory is, Wonka himself seems a little … off.

When he first greets his guests, he totters out of the factory like an old man before doing a little somersault. Half the things he says don’t seem to make much sense to anyone but Wonka himself. And then, of course, there’s the infamous boat ride—one of the freakiest, creepiest scenes in a movie for kids since Dumbo’s pink elephants.

Let’s be honest: Once we come to believe in God, we’re still often mystified by what He does. The world’s suffering confuses us. We’re frightened by its all-too-frequent horrors. We don’t understand God’s nature. We can’t. Sometimes our journey in faith can feel a little like that boat ride. And some of us just want to get off.

Those of us who stay for the ride grapple with the confusion as best as we can. We know that we’re not capable of understanding the mind of God. We offer ourselves well-honed sayings: “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” we say. But we still wish God would follow some sort of rulebook that we could read and understand—maybe one, ideally, that we’d write for Him. But God won’t do it. “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,” we’re told in 1 Corinthians. Or as Wonka himself says, “a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”