Wes Anderson’s Netflix shorts add a lot more layers to Roald Dahl’s stories
Although Wes Anderson’s four Netflix shorts adapting famed British author Roald Dahl can be viewed in any permutation, it’s worth watching them in release order. The series’ casting and imaginative flourishes probe Dahl’s young adult writings, which take a different tone from his most famous works, children’s novels like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches. These four esoteric adaptations — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher,andPoison — also serve as a Rosetta stone for Anderson’s influences and filmmaking style, uncovering the reasons his visual language continues to be so effective.
No matter where you jump into Anderson’s anthology, what’s immediately striking is the strange, unique way he adapts Dahl, treating his prose as the script, with actors practically narrating the entire text. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar helps viewers understand this approach on a gut level. As with the other three shorts, the line between “character” and “narrator” blurs, as the actors perform both the dialogue and its tags (“he said,” “she said,” “I said,” etc.) in lengthy takes, while Anderson’s whip-smart blocking and camera movement maintain a breakneck momentum.
All four shorts also pull back further, allowing a version of Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes) to frequently interject and embody his narrations. At 40 minutes long, Henry Sugar has a scope that lets it serve as a framing device for the anthology. It spends more time than the other, much shorter installments do with this fictitious Dahl in his busy, messy home, based on pictures of the real Dahl.
Like many of Anderson’s recent works, Henry Sugar features stories within stories within even more stories. Its idle, affluent titular
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