‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ Review: Wes Anderson Moves Into Literal Adaptation Territory In Charming Short Film
Benedict Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Cr. Netflix ©2023
As far as the directors’ landscape in Hollywood today goes, there’s really no question that Wes Anderson belongs in his own category. There’s really no one else like him making movies these days, and that’s not a good thing nor a bad thing: It’s just a fact. And as an avid moviegoer, there’s something extremely unique about knowing you’re in the hands of a creator who is all hands on deck; someone who will deliver you a unique vision, something you wouldn’t really have the chance to see if this person wasn’t around. This doesn’t make Wes Anderson movies any better, but they are inherently unique (I am no fan of The French Dispatch), and that’s something we should at least appreciate. His latest Netflix short film, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, an adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl’s short, is just another example of that.
With The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Anderson took a unique approach. He knew how beloved the original story was, because he’s himself extremely attached to it. When it came time to ponder how to bring this to the big screen, he realized that there was really no new twist he could put on the film that would elevate the material — the original short is already something unique and worth preserving in large part because of how it was written. So why reinvent the wheel? Let’s have the actors read it out loud.
This is obviously downplaying Anderson’s approach, but there’s hardly a more accurate way to describe it. His take on the book is a mix between a film (for obvious reasons), a play, which he fully embraces by having people move props in and out of the frame and a group of five actors act in it, with different roles depending on the scene, and an audiobook, as exemplified by some of the performers delivering their dialogue intercut with “I said” or “I cried”. It’s a shtick, of course, but therein lies the question: Does it work? For the most part. Anderson does his best to exploit the benefits of all three mediums and uses the film as a Venn diagram that probably works better than the sum of its parts.
(L-R) Dev Patel as Dr. Chatterjee, Sir Ben Kingsley as Imdad Khan and Richard Ayoade as Dr. Marshall in Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Cr. Netflix ©2023
In an Inception-like move, the narrative is structured in different layers, and from the very beginning we’re taken on a journey by Roald Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes), who tells us about Henry Sugar, a rich man bored out of his mind and only feeling the need to live until the next day just so he can keep making more money. One day, Mr. Sugar comes across a book about a man who learned to see without using his eyes. We now shift perspectives for the second time, so that Anderson can tell us the story-within-the-story-within-the-story. And then, we move up the ladder: Henry Sugar learns the lesson and decides to apply it to his life to make more money, which eventually leads to his character arc (I won’t spoil the specifics).
The definitive proof that Anderson’s directing power is the fact that he made such a lively, engaging, and memorable story that is told in a very robotic way. Benedict Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar or Ben Kingsley as Imdad Khan are essentially lifeless characters, with very rigid and emotion-less performances, yet they are used as the perfect vessel for Wes Anderson to make his point and also stand out because of how stone-cold they seem. Another example of this, of course, is the director’s classic aesthetic, which feels so refreshing when compared to the grey-blue color palette that Hollywood has embraced everywhere else. Every frame of the 40-minute short feels memorable and purposeful, and much like in theater, the backgrounds are not there to stand out, just to serve the specific purpose of letting the audience know where they are and not take away from what they’re doing there.
With The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Wes Anderson asks us to go back to the very basics of moviemaking and asking, what is the purpose of this? We want to tell a story. A stark reminder to everyone that all of this fanfare and pomposity that Hollywood has become is simply to tell a story that will reach people’s hearts and try to influence the way they look at life that way. There’s really no more obvious example of this than Benedict Cumberbatch’s Henry Sugar doing exactly that after reading a book himself. He is inspired by it and decides to apply his learnings to his own life, just like Roald Dahl expects the reader to do when he tells Henry Sugar’s tale, and much like Wes Anderson hopes to accomplish when he tells us about Roald Dahl narrating Henry Sugar.
Despite this, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar doesn’t feel like it’s coming from the same place that his more personal work like Asteroid City did. It’s more of an insight into how he’d read Dahl’s words rather than how he interprets them, and for that reason it lacks the emotion that his last film had, which also told stories within stories. That’s perhaps by design, and it also makes it had to critique — as opposed to reviewing what the story is, all we can do is point out how well it was translated to the screen. It’s pushing the art of adaptation to its limits; what are we supposed to criticizing him for the actual narrative, all we can do is say how well he pulled it off. Well, it worked for me.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is now available to stream on Netfilx. It’s the first of four shorts Wes Anderson is doing for them.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
