If Asteroid City was writer-director Wes Anderson’s love letter to the stage, his new Netflix short pays homage to stagecraft, with flats, backdrops, props, and even hair and makeup changes flying in from the wings.
An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is as much about the director’s love of arch humor, fourth-wall shattering, and aggressive art direction as it a redemption saga about a rich man who finds purpose in his life.
As such, it’s another entry in Anderson’s filmography which will delight his admirers while alienating his detractors, a commitment to a personal aesthetic that’s all too rare in contemporary cinema.
Another comparison to Asteroid City lies in the fact that Henry Sugar wraps a story within a story within a story: we open with Ralph Fiennes as Dahl, showing us his author’s hut before launching into the tale of Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), a useless rich man drifting through life without any real purpose except for an interest in becoming even richer while exerting as little effort as possible. While visiting a friend’s estate, Henry wanders into the library where he finds an Indian medical journal from the 1930s.
Having already jumped from the author to Henry’s story, the film leaps again into the journal, in which a doctor (Dev Patel) reports the extraordinary case of a man (Ben Kingsley) who could see without using his eyes. As Henry reads about how the man developed this skill, he decides to train himself to read playing cards from the other side so that he can earn a fortune at the blackjack table. But what begins as a selfish pursuit takes Henry’s life to a place that the wealthy wastrel could never have imagined.
There’s a lot to be said about the negative aspects of streaming — members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are, as of this writing, saying them loudly and clearly on the picket line — but one of the upsides has been a liberation from what is considered the traditional feature-length running time. If a filmmaker needs four hours to tell a story, or just 20 minutes, streaming can often allow them that freedom without having to worry about standard exhibition. And so, since Anderson needed 37 minutes to tell this story, it’s a treat to see him do so without having to trim down to 25 minutes for a half-hour TV slot or bump up to 85 minutes for theaters.
Within that 37 minutes, however, Anderson finds room for many of his trademark choices, from symmetrical shots (made all the more so in its moments of 1:1 aspect ratio) to actors staring at the camera for comic effect (Richard Ayoade demonstrates a real mastery of this technique). Ably supported by production designer Adam Stockhausen, the director plays around with form even more than usual; if a character is walking down the street, the actor will walk in place while a screen lowers behind him and creates a rudimentary process shot. As Kingsley’s character launches into a flashback, stylists emerge to make him look younger with new hair and makeup effects. And the only special effect involved to show a character levitating is a box painted to look like the backdrop.
Anderson’s cinematic landscape is both otherworldly and completely familiar, which makes him an ideal adapter of the works of Roald Dahl. (Fantastic Mr. Fox remains, for many an Anderson fan, the director’s most successful film and the truest manifestation of his particular screen vision.) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar might be short, but it’s Anderson through and through. Families can share the experience of watching it on Netflix, and short-film enthusiasts can live in hope that Anderson and Almodóvar’s recent embrace of the under-40-minute movie will lead to other auteurs doing likewise.
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenwriter: Wes Anderson, based on the story by Roald Dahl
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade
Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson
Director of photography: Robert Yeoman
Production design: Adam Stockhausen
Costume design: Kasia Walicka Maimone
Editing: Barney Pilling, Andrew Weisblum
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound: Wayne Lemmer, Christopher Scarabosio, supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer
Production companies: Netflix, Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Pictures
In English
37 minutes
