A series of Roald Dahl shorts do — and don’t do — the trick.
Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar leads the anthology of four short films based on stories by British literary fantasist Roald Dahl. That’s the episode Netflix successfully put up for the Academy Awards category of Best Animated Short, winning Anderson his belated prize. But Henry Sugar doesn’t represent the best of Anderson’s opulent humanism (The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and Asteroid City). Sugar belongs to his recent cynical phase of frenetic overproduction, starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Anderson always thought big: His interest in intimate communication between idiosyncratic people ran parallel with a love of complicated storytelling. Joyful fastidiousness makes him the most eccentric of indie filmmakers — so buoyant that he can express himself only on a large scale, with a retinue of famous actors as his traveling troupe. One Dahl story won’t do; his ingenuity runs to the elaboration of four convoluted tales, all featuring long-winded raconteurs atop the on-screen narrator Dahl (played by Ralph Fiennes).
There’s a crisis of overlong filmmaking right now, and this Netflix-produced anthology promises “wonderful” storytelling as if to resolve that issue, yet these anecdotes don’t grow out of one another, enhancing some thematic link. Instead, their style elaborates on a mise en abyme caprice that turns Dahl’s ingenuity from verbal to visual, showing off the whimsy of film craft by exposing behind-the-scenes stagecraft: The scenery is deliberately artificial, moved by briefly glimpsed stagehands, plus animated digital details, puppets, and, sometimes, sheer actorly pantomime. The manifest delight is obvious and busy. As in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson frantically overarticulates himself.
Rather than expanding and becoming richer, Anderson’s method folds in, like origami. Then, after the high point of Ben Kingsley playing Imdad Khan, a wise, modest member of a traveling theater company who is billed as “the man who can see without his eyes,” the four stories work independently. All are set in the past, as the British empire crumbles. Each one displays an eccentricity of Englishness — Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rich-twit gambler who appropriates Imdad Khan’s gift and unexpectedly becomes a philanthropist; Peter Watson (Rupert Friend) in The Swan survives childhood bullying to express adult remorse; Fiennes returns as a Cockney exterminator with rodent-like class resentment in The Rat Catcher; and an ensemble of Cumberbatch, Kingsley, and Dev Patel perform a neat allegory about the empire’s venomous racism in Poison.
Detractors have always labeled Anderson as “twee” because they misunderstood his humor as juvenile and dismissed his arch storytelling as unserious. This cultural depreciation has led to praise for vapid movies such as Barbie, Dune, and Oppenheimer. Yet Anderson persists. He sought justification for grandiloquent imagery in The French Dispatch, but its literary, art-world, journalistic references seemed little more than obnoxious social-climbing. The multiple characters and disconcerting social changes in Asteroid City were all of a piece through the nostalgic mix of television, live theater, and astrophysical aspirations.
In these Dahl shorts, Anderson flaunts his undeniable virtuosity (Henry Sugar is excessively decorative), but what makes them coherent also makes them unsettling. Dahl’s odd satire is the real affectation. Capitulating to youth in Moonrise Kingdom and invoking the Holocaust in Grand Budapest Hotel won Anderson broad acclaim. But ultimately, those films went against his best instincts (recovered in his 2016 Come Together holiday commercial for H&M). Now Anderson’s spiritual profundity is fleeting, as if the millennium’s anxiety has gotten to the last of the splendid entertainers.
Anderson’s formalism is always impressive. It becomes terrifying when The Swan illustrates life’s cruelty, each shifting perspective and visual in-joke brings a child’s ugly fate closer. And Poison shows Dahl’s debt to Rudyard Kipling in a knowing depiction of the empire’s defects. Together, these two dramas confirm Anderson’s shift from humanism to sardonic harshness.
Poison’s story of social ingratitude and cross-cultural helplessness ends the anthology with a jolt. It aligns with the current antipathy toward the West, which was subtle and ambivalent when Anderson paid tribute to Satyajit Ray’s Indian cinema in The Darjeeling Limited. That poignant “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” scene in Asteroid City (borrowed from Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest) is replaced by the Sugar anthology’s relentless cynicism. The times need not turn Anderson’s wonderful sense of play into tragedy. Had Anderson applied his quirky sympathy to the racial confusion of American experience, he might come closer to Kipling’s post-empire complexity, which David Lean surpassed when adapting E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
Anderson’s Dahl anthology does — and doesn’t — do the trick. The Academy waited too long to honor a filmmaker who had rediscovered warmth. Now, it salutes only his sarcasm.