"The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar:" or "Why Wes Anderson should direct more Roald Dahl Books"

In my last review, published far too long ago, I raked popular auteur director, Wes Anderson, over the coals for his self-indulgent and bloated use of stylism in his films. I argued that Anderson’s unbending adherence to his own cinematic trademarks often degraded his movies. He stuffs his films with movie stars who have nothing to do, wedges in pointless romantic subplots, and stifles the characters' emotions by having actors deliver their lines in classic Anderson mater-of-fact monotone. But even though the signature way he tells his narratives can make his features frustrating; when it works, it works wonders. All he needs is the right story to tell and the right tools from his toolbox to tell it and Wes Anderson can craft your new favorite movie. So, lo and behold, as if sensing my dissatisfaction across time and space, Anderson has countered my criticism with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 30-minute Netflix special that tells a story from an author whose works he seems star-crossed to adapt, Roald Dahl.

This isn’t Wes Anderson’s first encounter with Dahl, as his stop-motion adaptation of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” is, in the opinions of many including myself, his greatest directorial triumph and one of the best animated films of the 21st century. While his flavorful stylism sometimes clogs the story, the twee, painterly artificiality with which he sets his scenes, and the simple, relaxed way his quirky characters present themselves match perfectly with Roald Dahl’s brand of comfy yet earnest whimsey. Anderson’s signature look and reliable storytelling tricks accentuated Dahl’s source material with “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and achieved the same effect with the short story “The Wonderful Story of Mr. Sugar," though in the opposite fashion.

With “Mr. Fox,” Wes used his stylism to extract the marrow of the source material, capturing in its purest form the down-to-earth oddity of Dahl’s work while expanding the narrative away from the original simplistic vision. He transforms a classic Aesopian fable about pride and cleverness into a mid-life crisis movie about accepting one's nature and circumstances rather than becoming a slave to them or denying them entirely. On the opposite end of the spectrum, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” is about as direct an adaptation as one can achieve, with most of its script taken, verbatim, from the original text. It is played purposefully and straight, and I mean that literally, with the characters often directly narrating to the audience.

We are presented the strange tale of Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) a wealthy disinterested gambling enthusiast who comes upon the chronicled story of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley) an Indian circus performer who, through persistent meditative training, learns to see his surroundings without the use of his eyes. This is presented as a play-within-a-play ending with Khan’s sudden and innocuous death and the dismay of the doctors studying him about how his skills and secrets could have been used to assist the sick and blind. Sugar’s immediate reaction to this sad and harrowing tale that takes up the bulk of the run-time is, hilariously, to completely ignore the second half of the account and learn Khan’s meditative methods for the purposes of cheating at cards, a goal he achieves after years of work. However, of course, Sugar finds his ease at winning instantly boresome, and after literally throwing his hard-cheated winnings out of a window and seeing the clamoring of bystanders who actually need it, he is reinvigorated to use his skills to earn to do as much good as possible. It is a simple moral parable, and proudly so, but a vital one that should be told and that Anderson knows exactly how to tell it.

I, like generations of other kids, and Wes Anderson himself, if the vigor with which he adapts these works is anything to go by, spent most of my childhood bedtimes being lulled to sleep by Roald Dahl and his marvelously odd worlds. I would listen to a cassette tape of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” played on a boombox that was once the centerpiece of my bedroom. Closing my eyes, I can still remember the shocking “crack, crack, crack” of the farmers' rifles shooting off Mr. Fox’s tail, or the wispy high-pitched voice the narrator used to mimic Mrs. Fox, or the delicious detail with which the treasure troves of food the Fox and friends stole were described. Listening to the audiobook, as much as the story itself, is a core experience for me, one so central to my upbringing that if I were ever to find and listen to that cassette tape again, the nostalgic shock I would receive would send me into a coma.

Anderson understands this feeling, and how essential the act of storytelling itself is, so much so that his adaptation of “Henry Sugar” is not only unerringly faithful to the original text, it also ventures to capture the experience of experiencing the text itself. The short film is depicted as a sort of intense theatrical production orchestrated for our benefit specifically, characters reciting their lines tersely but earnestly, speaking directly to the audience often while maintaining eye contact. Characters turn towards the camera to narrate their actions no matter how minute, humorously interjecting quick “I said”s, “He said”s “I thought”s, and even “I did”s after every sentence. This hurried artificiality extends to the surroundings as well, with sets and backdrops sliding in from off-stage so that the story being expounded at us can proceed at pace. The visuals constantly rearrange themselves with costume changes and lighting tricks simulating the on-the-fly animated imagining and reimagining a child might go through while listening to the story late at night.

All in all, it makes for a very fluid and energetic watching experience. I must assume that Wes Anderson was frenetically bouncing his knees as he assembled the visual style of his short film, and I must both commend him for its execution and marvel at his restraint in shooting it as a one-take (or at least affecting the appearance of one), as that's the sort of cinematic brass ring I think he would drool over. Regardless, “Henry Sugar” presents itself as a strange and glorious visual audiobook. It is a story about a story being presented to us, even beginning with Roald Dahl himself (Ralph Fines) quietly musing over his writing process before locking eyes with the camera and methodically starting to narrate the story proper, as if the entire thirty-minute experience is simply his text being manifested to us as the author invents it.

Anderson’s purpose in staging “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” as very much a narrative being told to us is to underline the cardinal importance of storytelling to an audience in general. At the center of Henry Sugar’s short journey is the tale of a man who wasted his incredible talents and died unsatisfyingly and his response is to develop incredible talents, waste them, and then become dissatisfied. His failure to understand simple children's lessons is given major focus through double casting, Kingsley playing both the incredible Imdad Khan and the suspicious blackjack dealer who Sugar first attempts to fleece, as if the man he learned about is now testing and judging him and his games. More overtly, the police officer who shames Sugar for his lack of perspective and selfishness after he throws his winnings out of his apartment window is played by Fines, who also plays Dahl, the author himself telling his own creation the moral of the story that bears his name as its title.

The meaning behind “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” isn’t elusive. Doing good things is good and more satisfying than nothing at all. It's a lesson so uncomplicated and childish that it’s almost a cynical joke. But simple truths and complex truths are both just that - true. The world is full of people like Henry Sugar, who drift through life like so much flotsam, not contributing anything or living up to their capacity and then leaving the world no better than when they entered it as if they were born and lived as ghosts. And, of course, there are those people who are active but live life through taking and trampling and leave us all worse off. Some adults absolutely need to be sat down and told that good is good and bad is bad, as sophomoric as that may seem. You're never too old to outgrow a children's lesson. That is why fantastic fables, like the kind Roald Dahl made his bread and butter, are essential and continue to be told to each new generation and endure, at least to those of us with morals and reading comprehension.

Of course, more important than his treatise on the value of storytelling, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” is the glorious apotheosis of Wes Anderson’s Herculean strength as a director when he has focus and fetters. The quaint, painters-box set dressing, the forthright, self-assured line deliveries, and the ersatz dream-like shifting of backgrounds and locations embellish the source material and make for an aggressively charming half-hour, vividly reliving the experience of having a bedtime story read to you. I can only hope Wes Anderson gets the opportunity to direct more of Roald Dahl’s library, and with renewed trust, and hope not to be disappointed by whatever my favorite auteur's next congested passion project ends up being.

You can only hope, right?