The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar review: A spoonful of Wes Anderson

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.