The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar review: A spoonful of Wes Anderson
This charming Roald Dahl adaptation doesn't overstay its welcome, thanks to a short run time and a talented cast led by Benedict Cumberbatch
Film Reviews The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
By now you should know what you’re going to be getting when you sit down to watch a Wes Anderson film. His highly stylized worlds, full of muted colors, quirky characters, and deadpan dialogue, have become so distinctive and instantly recognizable it sometimes feels like he’s parodying himself. For his fans, his eccentricities are part of his charm. For his critics, they can be a bit tiresome (a common complaint about Anderson’s Asteroid City earlier this year). Both groups would likely agree that when it comes to Wes Anderson, a little goes a long way.
Fortunately, Anderson’s latest project, The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar, now available to stream on Netflix, only goes a short way. In other words, it’s about the length of a television episode. That’s roughly the amount of time it would take someone to read the complete Roald Dahl short story that inspired it aloud, which is essentially what the actors in the film are asked to do. Rather than bringing the story to life as a straightforward drama, Anderson treats it as more of a theatrical reading. The cast takes turns handing the narration off to one another, without a single weak link. It’s a fun and interesting approach to adaptation, though not one that could sustain an entire feature-length film without becoming grating.
Ralph Fiennes gets things going as Dahl himself, sitting down to work in his writing hut at Gipsy House, where the author (as we learn in the closing credits) really did complete the story between February and December of 1976. He introduces us to the character of Henry Sugar, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a selfish and greedy bachelor with a gambling compulsion. While visiting a friend’s manor house in the country, Henry wanders into the library, or rather he “mooches” into it. Dahl’s language is very particular, and fits so well with Anderson’s aesthetic that it’s not hard to see why he’d have been loath to change a single word. It’s already been established that this pairing can yield great results, since the last time Anderson adapted Dahl we got the stop-motion masterpiece Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Here, Cumberbatch picks up the narration, describing (in the third person) a thin notebook with a dark blue cover Henry discovers in the library. The book turns out to be a doctor’s first-hand account of meeting a man who had taught himself to see without using his eyes. The nesting-doll narrative (one of Anderson’s favorite devices) then takes us into that story, narrated at first by Dev Patel as the doctor and then later by Ben Kingsley as the miraculous man himself. When we come back to Henry, Cumberbatch explains how Henry uses the book to teach himself the same trick and what becomes of him after. Fiennes returns in the end to wrap everything up and remind us that this is a true story and the name Henry Sugar is a pseudonym to protect the identity of the man who inspired it.
The entire film is shot on a series of sets with backdrops that fly in and out, as the setting requires. As the actors move through the fabricated worlds, they transform around them. Stagehands come and go to bring in or take out props and furniture. At one point, Kingsley is transformed from an old man into a younger one by an onscreen makeup crew, including Cumberbatch in a secondary role, while we watch. There’s not even the vaguest pretense of a fourth wall. It’s almost like watching a stage production, if you don’t pay attention to the very precise way Anderson punctuates the scenes with his inventive framing and well-choreographed camerawork.
It’s all very clever, but none of it would work without a cast of eloquent, charismatic, and versatile actors holding down the center in their turn. Fiennes, Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley (with Richard Ayoade in a few supporting roles) each bring a different flavor (or flavour, if you will) of Britishness to Dahl’s prose, which Anderson has them deliver not only in his characteristic monotone manner, but at a breakneck pace. The rapid-fire recitation might be the filmmaker’s one big misstep here. He barely gives the actors a chance to breathe, much less sink into their characters. They’re not really supposed to, by design, but it still proves distracting.
The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar is the first of an anthology of four short films from Anderson based on short stories from the same Roald Dahl collection (and the only one provided to us for review), rolling out over the course of the next few days. The others will be based on “The Swan,” “Poison,” and “The Ratcatcher,” and will each run about 17 minutes long. In repertoire fashion, they’ll feature many of the same cast members in different parts (with the exception of Fiennes, who plays Dahl in all of them). If this initial offering is any indication of what we’ll get from the rest, we can expect a series of delightful confections, layered with emotion but not especially long, dense, or weighed down. As a main course, The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar probably wouldn’t be very satisfying, but as a light and airy dessert, it really hits the spot.
37 Comments
so it sounds like a stage play? b/c staging like that happens all the time in theatrical presentations.
“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” is my favorite Roald Dahl story, and Anderson’s approach here is a good match for the material, which is about (among other things) stories and storytelling, the nesting-doll nature of the tales being told sliding smoothly into Anderson’s wheelhouse. I was disappointed by the short shrift given to the character of Max, Henry’s makeup artist friend (inexplicably also played by Cumberbatch), but otherwise I thought this adaptation worked delightfully.The exact same approach did not work as well for me in “The Swan,” the second of the four adaptations Netflix is releasing. “The Swan” is a more concentrated, intense, and intimate story, and I think the nesting-doll storytelling style distances the audience from that intimacy. Dahl’s text, however, which the actors again recite verbatim, remains as powerful as ever.
Worth noting that all five main actors had multiple roles (Finnes as a policeman, Kingsley as the dealer, Patel as the accountant, and Ayoade as the original mediation teacher) – probably a function of the stage play-esque adaptation.
Yes, I know. That one just felt jarring to me, Cumberbatch emerging in the final seconds to deliver one line as Sugar’s best friend. Anderson might as well have cut the part entirely, the idea of disguises having emerged before Sugar has even met Max (unlike in the original story).
It was my favourite short story growing up , and the Netflix version does it justice , although the speed of the dialogue delivery sometimes feels like watching a youtube training video at 125% speed, and is a bit draining . Also considering at its deepest , its a story within a story, within a story , within ANOTHER story it’s all done really well.
The repeated faces was a plus for me. It heightened the playfulness and absolute break down of any suspended disbelief. Haven’t seen The Swan yet but it’s a bit of a bummer that this is perhaps going to be the standard approach for the series. I would have welcomed different tacks for each short.
If anyone’s interested, I love this Anderson short, which I believe was a deleted portion of Darjeeling Ltd.
I honestly like the short better than I liked the full Darjeeling Ltd. It’s a better use of “Where Do You Go To My Lovely” to boot.
I actually think I liked The Swan even more than Henry Sugar, it just left me sitting there for a couple minutes. It almost seemed like a test, of how much you can take this super bleak story being told in this stylized way. And Rupert Friend was just phenomenal in it.
Thats good to know. I wanted to like Asteroid City but it but ultimately I got little out of it. Bite sized Wes Anderson sounds like a better choice.
Is it worth watching? I felt like the French Dispatch was more a parody of Wes Anderson. If he toned things back to the Zissou/Budapest days, where he focuses on characters and allows the scenes to breath more rather that relying on metamodern gimmicks, I’d be much more eager to get back to him.
My wife, who learned English as a second language, said she found it exhausting, and I kinda agree. You know it’s too wordy when the subtitles have to paraphrase the spoken lines just to keep up.
english is my first language and i concur.
Same for me, and I speak English as a first language. The non-stop recitation of the narrative got tiresome.
We watched this last night; it was delightful. I’m not a huge Anderson fan; I like some of his movies quite well and others just fine, while yet others I’ve found boring. I think a shorter format is about the right amount of Anderson, at least for me.
I enjoyed Henry Sugar, but after this and Asteroid City I think he should challenge himself by seeing if he can do a straightforward, gimmick-free narrative film again.
stop-motion anderson is the best anderson.
Ain’t no Anderson like stop-motion Anderson ‘cause stop-motion Anderson ironically can’t stop!
I’m a big fan of his but I couldn’t finish Asteroid City.
Same. The last Anderson movie I really enjoyed was Grand Budapest Hotel. I think my favorite is Moonrise Kingdom. Fantastic Mr Fox is great too.
i think it’s interesting that, over 20 years in, you’re still framing it as a ‘gimmick’. i also think the way he does things looks and feels way more ‘challenging’ than him making another bottle rocket.asteroid city, to me, was quite moving and felt very emotional within his style. felt like a step forward to me.
Felt the same. Let Anderson be Anderson.
It would be great if he challenged himself to Dogma-like conditions to show us what the “real” world looks like through his eyes.
You want him to make a film starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels with a cameo by Alanis Morissette as God?
I would happily murder someone if it would get Jason Mewes a part in an Anderson film.
That would be amazing.
This is as Wes Anderson as Wes Anderson gets. If you love his work, you’ll love it, if not, stay far away.
I kind of would have preferred to see all 4 short films as one anthology film like Four Rooms or Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
He did that with French Dispatch and all the reviews I read were “Ugh. Why is this anthology film so anthology-y?”
(The Swan is live, BTW, at least in the US.) I really loved the pacing. I had to really focus to keep up, letting the words flow through my brain — no checking your phone during this one. This was a demanding but rewarding creative choice. And it also matched the playful, DGAF ethos of Dahl. Keep up or get left behind! I truly would love to see Anderson direct a film under less affected conditions. I think the relative uncontrollability of the settings of Darjeeling Ltd. gave us the closest thing to a “loose” Anderson film (not counting Bottle Rocket). It also happens to be my favorite of his films (not a popular opinion!).
Jarvis Cocker??Fuck it, why not:
I see what you did there
I went in knowing nothing about Dahl’s short story and I absolutely loved Anderson’s take on it. The rapid dialogue wasn’t an issue for me.
It’s so wonderful to see Anderson take on television. Remarkable casting, brilliantly filmed. A treat to have them rolled out over 4 days.
If he does a second season of this, will we get “Lamb to the Slaughter” with some of the narration done by the leg of lamb? (Richard Ayodae as the leg, please)
I would love for a genre, not so much of ‘cinema’ per se, with all those attendant market and setting expectations, . . . but a new genre of ‘augmented audiobook’ to arise. This felt like a glimpse into Anderson’s experience of reading the book, and it seems like a valuable genre to explore. A reading of the prose augmented by the visualizations of notable fellow consumers to accompany the audio experience. Surely some content provider in the streamiverse had the vision and resources to realize it. Heck, let them have some sort of exclusive copyright to the particular concept for a while, if it helps the genre off the ground.
Mrs. F. and I just watched Asteroid City and haven’t seen anything as boring since The French Dispatch. We’re Anderson ‘completists,’ so we’ll see these Netflix adaptations. Hoping for better!