Masterful melancholy imbues the best of Wes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2023 (1112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wes Anderson films always look beautiful. That’s a given. But what does all that beauty do?

For me, that highly mannered, exquisitely executed cinematic style sometimes remains alienating and emotionally inert. (I would put Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited in the category of Anderson films I just don’t get.) At other times, it really hits me, as with this year’s Asteroid City, an aqua-and-orange desert diorama that somehow released waves of mid-life loss and grief.

Is this just me, feeling melancholy and a bit susceptible, or is it Wes?

Either way, he got me again with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a close adaptation of a Roald Dahl tale now streaming on Netflix. In this compact and concise 39-minute project, the American auteur goes all-out on artifice, operating at peak visual perfection, all in service to sweet, almost Dickensian sentiment, in a moral fable of a rich man reformed.

This is a story about stories, a film about films, with a conjurer (played by Ben Kingsley) at its centre. Anderson seems to be reflecting on moviemaking as conjuring trick, and against the usual rules, he wants to show us how it’s done. (Well, in a way. The revelation of tricks here is just one more subtle level of trickery.)

In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, soundstages and sets are built and moved and dismantled in front of us. Curtains and painted backdrops rise and fall. Ruses of makeup and costume are changed in front of our eyes. There are models and maquettes, animations and optical illusions, all unfolded before us like the wonders of some elaborate children’s pop-up book.

The content, meanwhile, is a series of nested stories. The characters act as narrators, the fourth wall dissolving in their deadpan, direct gaze as they describe their own actions and dialogue.

We start with Roald Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes), in cardigan and carpet slippers in his writing hut, rather fussily setting up his pad and arraying his pencils. He tells us of Henry Sugar, a rich, selfish, bored man who has never worked a day in his life. Men like Henry “are simply part of the decoration,” Roald suggests, and Anderson seems to take this literally. (Benedict Cumberbatch was perhaps chosen to play the title role purely because his eyes so perfectly match the decor of Henry’s beautifully appointed London flat.)

The telling of the story then shifts to Henry, at a country house party and vaguely discontented until he stumbles onto an unusual book. We then meet the author of the book, Dr. Z.Z. Chatterjee (Dev Patel), who relates an account of a man who could see without using his eyes.

Finally, we move to the man himself, Imdad Khan (Kingsley), who describes how the lessons of a revered yogi (Richard Ayoade) and decades of concentrated practice have allowed him to see even when blindfolded.

Imdad also happens to mention that when looking at the backs of playing cards, he can visualize the front, which brings us back to Henry, who is desperate to master this technique. Uninterested in insight and illumination, Henry just wants to become even richer by cheating at blackjack. Thankfully, the patient process of learning itself saves him. By the time he can make millions at the gambling tables, he has some better ideas about how to use his skill.

The film’s super-compressed setup is intricate, the delivery is deliberately flat, the movement is carefully choreographed. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar could come off as self-enclosed and purely mechanical, but there’s a wistful ghost in this machine.

Once more, Wes made me cry with the beauty and sweetness of it all.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more.
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.