I seem to be having a bit of a private Wes Anderson festival lately. Some cinematic research led me to re-watch Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, and his latest, Asteroid City. As always, I was charmed by Anderson’s enchanting visuals, and by his use of some of the world’s best actors in quirky and unexpected ways. And yet I could never shake the notion that most of Anderson’s work is much ado about nothing: that he lacks the story sense to make something that actually has meaning. With Oscar night coming up so soon, it’s appropriate to mention that Anderson’s films have never lacked for Academy love. Over the years, there have been 16 nominations in various categories, most of them technical. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014—perhaps the Anderson work with the most to say) actually collected 9 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. And it won statuettes for its costume design, hair and makeup, production design, and original score. Still, the big prizes have eluded Anderson himself, maybe because many Academy voters see Anderson’s works as charming stunts, rather than as truly meaningful creations.
Perhaps this will be the year when Anderson finally wins his own Oscar. He’s on the short list not for Asteroid City (which got shut out of all categories) but for his forty-minute adaptation of a Roald Dahl tale, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Dah’s whimsical though sometimes macabre way of looking at the world seems to beautifully suit Anderson’s stylistics, allowing him to romp visually while giving some spine to his storytelling. Clearly Anderson is on a Roald Dahl kick: for Netflix he has applied his cinematic skills to a whole 1976 volume of Dahl stories, of which “Henry Sugar” is the first and best.
For “Henry Sugar,” Anderson enjoys the services of some of England’s finest, including Benedict Cumberbatch (as the title character), along with Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and (playing a version of Dahl himself) Ralph Fiennes. All seem to have been directed to play straight to the camera, delivering their lines at a speedy deadpan clip as though they were reading straight from the Dahl text. And what a text it is, comprising an exotic tale within a tale. Fiennes as Dahl introduces us to Henry, a wealthy Englishman whose only goal is increasing his substantial fortune by playing cards for money. In his countryman’s well-furnished library he happens upon the account of an Indian mystic who learned after years of strenuous concentration to read with his eyes securely bandaged. To Henry, the knowledge of this possibility leads immediately to thoughts of how he can best his card-playing cronies by being able to read the cards in a deck though only seeing their backsides. He applies himself to this effort, and succeeds magnificently, coming away with a brick-sized packet of cold, hard cash. But of course things don’t work out as planned, and Dahl’s neat twist of an ending shows us the surprising ways that greed can work on the human psyche.
Dahl has supplied the story line: Anderson contributes his own magic, mostly of the visual variety. His locations—whether they represent Dahl’s cozy writing cottage, a baronial stately home, an Indian guru’s jungle hut, or a hospital lounge—all seem as artificial as stage sets, and they come apart and re-form (with the help, at times, of stagehands) with dazzling speed. What Anderson has achieved is a short film that gives us the immediacy, and the aesthetic pleasure, of live theatre. Which makes me wonder: why doesn’t Anderson give stage work a try?
No comments:
Post a Comment