4 short Dahl tales adapted by Wes Anderson add up
The new Wes Anderson adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, now streaming on Netflix, outpace and outsatisfy so many of Anderson’s feature-length projects, the question simply is this: Why? What is it about Anderson’s visual, narrative, emotional and adaptive approach to this material — his second Dahl effort, following the stopmotion-animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — that works so well?
A few guesses. For one, I think, the short form flatters and crystallizes Anderson’s every decision, and even the multilayered framing devices and nesting- doll stories within stories deepen our enjoyment. The longest of the quartet, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” runs 41 minutes. The others run about 17 minutes apiece: “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison” — and that’s probably the ideal order for viewing, if you begin with “Henry Sugar.”
Beyond that, there’s a more vital level of comic invention afoot here than I’ve seen since my favorite Anderson feature, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” nearly a decade ago. Much of that vitality must be credited to Ralph Fiennes, a key member of this four- story anthology’s quite perfect ensemble.
Often, critics settle for the word “deadpan” to describe many, or most, of the performances in an Anderson film, and for Anderson’s geometrically precise framing. Sometimes the deadpan part is true; more often, though, the best Anderson performances get up to many things at once. The voice subtly delineates the emotions not immediately clear on the surface, or on the actor’s face. Other times it’s the other way: The face tells all, while the comparatively flat affect of the verbal component suggests someone struggling, almost invisibly, to maintain control amid an emotional crisis
Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade make up the bulk of this Dahl company, and they are on it. The stories come from different parts of Dahl’s life, spanning the 1940s to the 1970s. In “Henry Sugar,” a wealthy English layabout and occasional and dishonest gambler (Cumberbatch) happens on the story of a yogi ( Kingsley) who has mastered the art of seeing with his eyes closed. This story ends quite happily; “The Swan,” the cruelest of the four — Dahl appears to have drawn painful inspiration from his physically abused boarding- school days — concerns a sensitive young boy bullied, in ghastly and potentially murderous fashion, by a pair of older boys. That one ends not happily, but not without a glimmer of just desserts. (Dahl was surely one of the bleakest fantasists since Hans Christian Andersen, though funnier.)