Some films by Wes Anderson are better than others, but The Wonderful History of Henry Sugar is his masterpiece. He has always been text-driven with superb visuals, but the mixture in this film is the perfect cocktail, where every taste reflects on the story, with the images supporting the works but not overstating them. The film is 39 minutes long but consists of something timeless and has an emotional punch. Anderson has a technique where he tells the story directly to the audience and does not always show the action. Still, here, he exposes the inner world of his characters, where their motives seem apparent but are textural in their meaning. As a viewer or passenger, I’m told by this fable’s multi-layering of a narrative within a narrative that is a parallel universe working simultaneously.
The story is by the author Roald Dahl, who is popular, but at this time, I haven’t read any of his works. Dahl is a children’s author but also wrote other types of fiction. Wes Anderson also made other Dahl-related films: the feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and three others for Netflix, besides Henry Sugar. The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison are short films based on the British author’s stories. Since I haven’t seen the others, I can only comment on Mr. Fox and Henry Sugar, and I suspect they are adapted very closely to Dahl’s intent and style. The approach is literary, and it seems the script’s narration is very close to the source, which makes Henry Sugar a unique work. The story is told in first-person through the various characters, including the author. The style is very much a Japanese Kabuki theater setting but transported into a Wes Anderson landscape. His artistry is to take from a literary source and turn it into cinematic practice, but he does not distance himself from the Dahl vision. It is a collaboration between the filmmaker and the writer in the truest sense.
The acting is seamless by Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade, which is remarkable due to the story’s language and how they pace themselves to recite the text at a speed that is very much the Anderson aesthetic. Even Jarvis Cocker’s cameo presence is genius. If anyone else tried to direct actors in such a concept, they would more likely fail. But here, it works, and this is engineering, a piece of machinery that is perfection as practiced. Or, at the very least, magic at work.
Thanks Tosh, I’m looking forward to this. I read an interview with Wes Anderson about how long it took him to finally figure out how to approach this story. I just watched again, The Grand Budapest Hotel and marveled at his skill in telling a story.