Great Story of Henry Sugar overview: Wes Anderson’s oddest movie but

This overview of Wes Anderson’s The Great Story of Henry Sugar comes from the movie’s premiere on the 2023 Venice Worldwide Movie Pageant. The movie shall be launched later this September.

Earlier this yr, Wes Anderson launched the charming, melancholy Asteroid Metropolis. It bore his signature youngsters’s pop-up e-book model, however with a view to chip away on the hardened layers of grief, he offered his typical prospers with uncanny restraint. His second launch of 2023, The Great Story of Henry Sugar, rushes in the wrong way, changing mournful silences with the nonstop rattle of narration whereas constructing exuberant layers of eye-popping façade.

A 40-minute adaptation of a 70-page story, Henry Sugar is as a lot Anderson’s model of the story as it’s an ode to the writer, Roald Dahl. (Anderson beforehand tailored considered one of Dahl’s different youngsters’s books, 1970’s Improbable Mr. Fox.) In actual fact, Dahl’s brief — a part of the short-story assortment The Great Story of Henry Sugar and Six Extra — is so uniquely suited to Anderson’s sensibilities, with its multi-layered narrative and imaginative whimsy, that this mission is the closest page-to-screen translation in cinema.

That will sound like hyperbole, however the best way Anderson makes use of Dahl’s textual content verges on experimental. It isn’t the idea for his script, it’s the script itself, with characters enacting the plot whereas narrating the prose word-for-word. They usually comply with their very own traces of dialogue with “I stated” and related, turning briefly to the digital camera, as in the event that they’re all collectively studying the story to the viewers.

That concept might be misguided, nevertheless it creates a rapid-fire vitality. Anderson had his forged virtually memorize your entire story and ship it in lengthy, unbroken bursts, as they saunter between flats and painted units that transfer to disclose new ones every time there story modifications setting. If not for a handful of particular, pointed cuts used to emphasise poignant moments, it will really feel as if the entire movie have been a stage manufacturing playfully shot in a single take.

Whereas the topic of the story seems to be rich gambler Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), the title is a little bit of a bait-and-switch, since Henry solely options prominently within the closing third. The precise topic is the “fantastic story,” instructed by a narrator (Ralph Fiennes) who introduces Sugar simply as he discovers a health care provider’s journal that information the recollections of an Indian man with the mystic potential to see with out his eyes. Naturally, Sugar instantly thinks about how that potential might assist him win card video games. Proper from the outset, this construction falls completely consistent with Anderson’s method to a number of of his current movies (The Grand Budapest Lodge, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid Metropolis), wherein a narrative’s telling is as very important because the story itself.

Photograph: Netflix

Fiennes opens the story as a reclusive author wearing heat, earthy tones, seated cozily in a messy cottage splattered with private belongings. That looks like every other tableau that might have sprung forth from Anderson’s thoughts — with the assistance of manufacturing designer Adam Stockhausen and cinematographer Robert Yeoman, two of his key collaborators — nevertheless it’s based mostly totally on actual footage of Roald Dahl, all the way down to the tiniest element.

With Grand Budapest, French Dispatch, and Asteroid Metropolis, Anderson framed his films as, respectively, a collection of interviews, a symposium about newspaper articles, and a teleplay a couple of stage play, hopscotching throughout media to disguise his most emotionally impactful moments. The Great Story of Henry Sugar is a e-book about books, so he adapts the very act of its authorship. That bares one of the vital weak elements of his course of up entrance: inspiration. The remainder of the movie is a mile-a-minute comedy, nevertheless it begins as a fantasy collaboration between Anderson, who started making movies in 1992, and Dahl, who died in 1990.

This transferring tribute rapidly offers strategy to managed chaos. Sugar discovers a journal belonging to Z.Z. Chatterjee (Dev Patel), an Indian physician in pre-Impartial Calcutta. (The unique physician was English, one of many few modifications Anderson makes to replace the fabric and its perspective.) Dr. Chatterjee narrates the story of the mysterious, seemingly magical Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who sees with out sight. As every character introduces a brand new layer of the story (which is to say, another person’s story, instructed orally or written down), the setting quickly transforms as clearly seen stagehands wheel new backdrops on and off display screen.

Most of those areas are represented by stylized matte work, although every so often, the digital camera follows characters into an not possible third dimension, discovering phases inside phases the place nothing ought to actually be. It’s marvelously energetic, and it’s made all of the extra hilarious by the truth that some characters, like Dr. Chatterjee, operate as narrators too, and are pressured to separate their consideration between the digital camera, and fellow actors (like Richard Ayoade, who performs a fellow physician).

Photograph: Netflix

Quite a few make-up and costume modifications occur on and simply off display screen, as Cumberbatch, Fiennes, Patel, Kingsley, and Ayoade soar between every layer of the story to fill in as minor supporting characters whereas disguised in heavy make-up, the best way they might if this have been an area stage manufacturing. (Crowds of extras are heard, however by no means seen.)

Nevertheless, this cross-pollination of actors additionally speaks to the best way every writer appears to place part of themselves into the tales they inform, even when they’re telling another person’s story. Khan’s story doesn’t exist with out Chatterjee, simply as Chatterjee’s doesn’t exist with out Sugar, and Sugar’s doesn’t exist with out the anonymous Dahl stand-in. It’s a enjoyable recreation of “spot the star,” but additionally an expression of an inventive mission assertion. Anderson’s distinctly recognizable model — simply imitated, however by no means replicated — is the best way he places himself into his tales.

Strive as they may to mimic Anderson, individuals utilizing AI instruments to ape him or making TikTok or YouTube movies in his model lack each Anderson’s depth of influences (from Dahl, or from filmmakers like Satyajit Ray) and the flexibility to synthesize these inspirations right into a uniquely private, uniquely cinematic imaginative and prescient. The Great Story of Henry Sugar is slavishly adherent to its supply materials, however that side of its creation is a crucial peek into Anderson’s inventive course of, depicting what could have been, in all chance, his personal expertise of studying the story and imagining his personal model of it. It’s a brief movie, however its portrayal of inspiration, self-evident in each its artistry and homage, is solely huge.

The Great Story of Henry Sugar debuts on Netflix Sept. 27.