The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar Speaks To The Power Of Unfettered Imagination

Roald Dahl’s sensibilities as a storyteller and allegorist find a perfect home in Wes Anderson’s cinematic oeuvre, writes Prahlad Srihari.

The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar. Netflix

CLOCKING in at 39 minutes but densely packed with incident, wit and visual wonder, Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar centres around the wealthy Englishman (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) of the title who learns to see without his eyes, an ability that allows him to cheat at cards and become even wealthier. Avarice leads to emptiness leads to self-reflection leads to self-reformation. The moral order of a flushbunking but swashboggling world is inevitably re-established. The joy, however, lies in how Anderson uses his stream of quirkiness and his prodigious ensemble of ripe tragicomic talent to transform Roald Dahl’s written word into a darkly imaginative diorama for the screen. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar marks Anderson’s second adaptation of a Dahl story after 2009’s Fantastic Mr Fox. It is the flagship entry in an anthology of four Dahl adaptations, with The Swan The Ratcatcher and Poison arriving on Netflix in the next three days.

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At the core of the film is an appealing idea: of training the mind's eye in such a way as to develop the skill to push the limits of human perception and direct the consciousness beyond material boundaries. As Schopenhauer suggested, we tend to take the limits of our field of vision for the limits of the world. We trust what we see in the light. But the whole truth lies beyond, in the shadows, in our blind spots. On the flipside, the built-in fundamental limit of our vision should not always be considered a hindrance. Because if we could see everything, even with eyes closed, it would make everything knowable and thus foreseeable. Where then would be the mystery to life? As Henry comes to realise in the film, there would be “no thrill, no suspense, no danger.” In a scene, Henry’s extra-ocular vision works like an X-ray: his body becomes a grotesquely transparent apparatus, revealing the biological inner workings. Let's say you knew the exact thing that is going to kill you, wouldn't knowing it for certain ruin how you live your present?

Dahl’s sensibilities as a storyteller and allegorist find a perfect home in Anderson’s dollhouses. Each detail embedded into this symmetrical world serves to enrich the source material. The film moves amiably along from one precise tableau to another, fuelled by the particular genius of Anderson’s go-to artistic collaborators. Adam Stockhausen’s production design is another triumph in terms of how to use colour to give a sense of personality to each setting, be it early 20th century Calcutta or mid-20th century London. The runtime may mistake viewers into regarding The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar as a sideshow attraction in the Wes Anderson canon. But the short film still contains moments of such unfettered imagination they will be doing cartwheels in your mind for long.

Building on the Brechtian traditions of his previous film Asteroid City Anderson gives us another film whose artifice pokes through to reveal a world outside its fiction. Backdrops wheel in an out of frame. Stagehands step in and out with props. Actors switch costumes, make-up and entire roles. Cumberbatch grows a beard in the span of a single scene. As with Asteroid City, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar too is staged like a theatrical production for the screen — a cross-media strategy that suits a cinematic retelling of a story-within-a-story-within-a-story.

As the film zips by, key characters address the viewer, like they were actors reading to us a story. The first to break the fourth wall is Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself, dressed in a cardigan and cozy slippers, seated in an armchair in his Buckinghamshire home, six pencils sharpened, coffee, cigarettes and chocolates by his side to fuel the creative venture ahead i.e. writing “the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Soon as Dahl turns to the camera to narrate the tale, the set is replaced with another: a countryside mansion hosting a party where Henry takes over the narration. While loitering in the library, Henry comes across a medical report, in which an Indian doctor named Dr ZZ Chatterjee (Dev Patel) recounts the strange case of Imdad Khan (Sir Ben Kingsley) — a man who could see without his eyes.

From there, we are ferried to pre-Independence India with Patel’s Dr Chatterjee now taking over the narration to describe how he and fellow doctor Marshall (Richard Ayoade) put to test Mr Khan’s supposedly hard-learnt skill. When quizzed on how he came to master his skill, we are transported to the late 19th century when a young Mr Khan learnt the art of concentration from a levitating yogi (Ayoade again) in the jungles of India. Upon reading Dr Chatterjee’s report and learning how Mr Khan mastered his skill, Henry trains hard to master it himself. What comes next is how a bored rich man, devoted to getting rich and nothing else, reforms himself and ultimately finds redemption in charity — a story told by Henry’s accountant John Winston (Dev Patel again) to Dahl, as things come full circle.

The framework of a story-within-a-story-within-a-story captures how in retelling stories about others, we are also telling stories about ourselves. Acknowledging the framework lends further emotional ballast to the text Anderson adapts. When he set The French Dispatch in a town called Ennui-sur-Blasé or when he had the whole cast of Asteroid City chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” these aren’t signs of a filmmaker caught in a holding pattern. But of a filmmaker managing to let a sense of discovery and wisdom shine through, despite the controlled conditions and the underlying melancholy of his films.

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