Best Wes Anderson film in years – Rolling Stone

The golden rule is usually “show, don’t tell.” And Wes Anderson is a filmmaker – judging by his extreme accuracy mise en scene, The overly polite methods of storytelling, the obsessive organization and the compulsive on-screen footnotes – seem to love the structure that comes with obeying unwritten rules. It’s best to break it once in a while, of course, or at least tweak your parameters in a way that suits the material and your signature. There is a lot of Westhetic to be expected The wonderful story of Henry Sugar, With enough information-packed symmetrical frames and perfectly positioned characters speaking as if their tongues were married to their cheeks. It’s undeniable for him A film full of style It is easily recognizable so it can be easily emulated.

Except that Anderson has set his visual template on the same level as the prose his actors recite—not just the dialogue, but the actual prose—along with enough meta-theatrical trickery to make Bertolt Brecht say “Whoa, calm down, mate.” Show, don’t read This seems to be the appropriately modified warning for our man Wes here. But here’s where things get weird: All of this artifice breathes life into Anderson’s vision of another auteur’s work, and somehow taps into something vital that’s been missing from his last few features. It’s basically an elaborate stage reading, just 40 minutes long, and in terms of what Anderson does best, it’s close to perfect.

It is adapted from a short story by Roald Dahl, the writer who Wonderful Mr. Fox The director has worked with Wonders before, and helps things greatly. Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion animation version of Dahl’s novel about the elegant fox and his friends remains a high point in his career and, ironically, one of the director’s most organically humane films; In a way, by removing real people from his control-freak compositions and creating an environment that he could carefully calibrate for his content, he revealed something deeply emotional in his work. (The stop-motion technique was well suited to his strengths as a fussy formalist, but it also liberated him in a way.)

There’s still the feeling of watching an artist play with giant dollhouses — or, we think, Dahl houses — in this first of four short films based on the author’s literary tales. But his embrace of the literal interpretation of the text, attribution and all, as well as distributing that in one brief section rather than one of an anthology, keeps things not only short, but sharp as well. For all its tattered shag, Dahl’s story is polished to a fine point. Anderson praises the adherence to the text word for word.

“Henry Sugar was 41 years old, unmarried, and wealthy,” Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) himself tells us. Unlike today’s billionaires, Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) is part of an aristocratic society of spendthrifts who are “not bad men, but not good men either.” They are simply part of the decoration.” Browsing through the palace’s bookshelves one afternoon, he discovered a small book detailing how an elderly man named Imdad Khan (Sir Ben Kingsley) trained himself to “see without using his eyes.” The author of said book is Dr. ZZ Chatterjee (Dev Patel), who along with fellow medical practitioner Dr. Marshall (Richard Ayoade) met this extraordinary person in Calcutta, whereupon he mastered the ability to read things while blindfolded, with bandages around the head, or with poor eyesight. Khan tells them how a yogi taught him (also Awad) Once had to go beyond his senses; later, after the old man became a sensation on stage as an illusionist, the old man died. However, Sugar is determined to master the trick no matter how long it takes. Think of how much What a wonderful gamble if he can identify each card without using his sight!

In an interview with the The New York Times, Anderson said he spent half a decade trying to figure out how to spin Henry Sugar In film, it was not until he came up with the idea of ​​having the characters speak as if they were telling Dahl’s story from the page—that is, telling her story to the audience as it was happening—that he solved the puzzle. This may be cheating in terms of maintaining a queer authorial voice in the film adaptation, but it’s grounded in everything precisely in Dahl’s storytelling. Anderson hasn’t given up his unique sound in the process, mind you. He had just discovered a way to coordinate with his subject.

This is definitely a movie on Storytelling, more than the idle rich, the spiritually transgressed, and the illicit thrills of a broken blackjack hand. You see stage hands move players on dolly tracks, and one-dimensional sets are moved in and out. Each of the actors plays multiple roles (as they will apparently do in the other three accompanying shorts; Anderson has said he envisioned Cumberbatch, Patel, and others as the theater troupe equivalent of the entire quartet). At one point, Benedict helps Sir Ben change his on-screen wig, and waits for him to return to the frame. There are so many stories hidden within stories hidden within other stories, that the only logical response is to think: Scheherazade cried.

Anderson has also used variations of the curtain-peeling technique and old-fashioned theatrical tropes in his other works this year: ambitious but strangely archaic asteroid city, Which oscillates between a “theatrical” involving stoic aliens, 1950s starlets, and Cold War hawks and doves, and the Methodist actor’s melodrama that fuels a television production of said work. However, the meta-tricks here (including Dahl’s rewriting of the fairy tale from an elaborate recreation of the “writing shack”) enhance the director’s aim rather than distract or dilute it. And thanks to its short runtime, it doesn’t wear out its welcome either. Henry Sugar It simply comes in hot, weaves its way through the agony and ecstasy of Dahl’s eloquent sentences and elegant asides, and then, after a dozen or so set pieces, shows itself. You can hardly call it a movie. However, you can recognize it as one of Wes Anderson’s best attempts to turn his own idiosyncrasies and those of his literary idol into something like art – and the most satisfying posthumous double work of all time.