It’s Wes Anderson’s second Roald Dahl adaptation – and his third, fourth and fifth, too. So far, it’s a project that has restored some critical lustre to the esoteric American director’s work after mixed reactions to his most recent films, The French Dispatch and this year’s Asteroid City.
However, Anderson’s latest is not coming soon to a cinema near you.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and his three other Dahl short story adaptations – The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison – arrive on Netflix in quick succession this month, after Henry Sugar debuted to acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.
After 2022′s film, Matilda the Musical, it is Netflix’s second Dahl production since the company bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for US$686 million in 2021.
But the genesis of Anderson’s Henry Sugar adaptation predates that. He read the story while staying at Gipsy House, Dahl’s family home in Buckinghamshire, nearly 20 years ago, and was intrigued by how it could work on screen.
His Dahl immersion period led to his 2009 stop-motion animated feature of Fantastic Mr Fox. Henry Sugar, though, had a complicated construct for the screen. The narrator tells the story of a man who finds a journal written by another man. Anderson found himself as interested in Dahl’s storytelling as he was in the story itself.
“The story completely hooked me as a child, but if you take away his words, well, I guess, it’s not a movie I felt compelled to do,” he said. “It’s a great Dahl story, but if I do it using his words, his descriptions, then maybe I know how to do it.”
He cast Ralph Fiennes – who had played the lead in his The Grand Budapest Hotel – as Dahl reciting the story in his writer’s hut at Gipsy House. He’s part of an ensemble of Brits, which also includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayoade.
“I have a little history with Ralph Fiennes, and having Ralph play Dahl was something that made me kind of want to do it.”
Cumberbatch plays Sugar and another character, Max Engleman, a make-up artist helping to disguise Sugar from suspicious casino owners. The rest of the cast also play two characters in the first episode and other characters in The Swan, The Ratcatcher and Poison.
Henry Sugar is 40 minutes, but the other three are 17-minute tales, respectively about a bright boy pursued by bullies; a rat standing up for itself and a man who discovers a poisonous snake asleep in his bed.
They may be brief, but unlike Anderson’s recent character-based features, they are driven by plots and stories where things actually happen. And of course, Anderson isn’t the first director to put Dahl’s work on screen. That list goes back to the 1950s and 1960s when the writer himself wrote grown-up American television dramas and later movie scripts while churning out kids’ books.
So, a television series of Dahl stories made by a film-maker whose movies seem perpetually caught somewhere in the mid- to late-20th century might feel like an idea whose time has come. So, too, is using the words of the man himself as he wrote them, a possible reassertion of Dahl-ness after publisher Puffin Books started releasing versions of his classics edited for modern sensitivities. l
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, September 27; The Swan, September 28; The Ratcatcher, September 29, Poison, September 30, on Netflix.
