‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in Wes Anderson’s Mini-Marvel of a Roald Dahl Adaptation

Do reactions to Wes Anderson films seem to be getting more divided?

Look at one of those review aggregator sites and it appears the spread of opinion is getting wider, judging by responses to his last film, Asteroid City, and the one before, The French Dispatch. Perhaps it’s a natural consequence of familiarity’s tendency to breed both contempt and sated pleasure. The very elements one viewer might love — the whimsy, the surfeit of design in every detail, the teeming casts, lashings of voiceover and intricate narratives — can be another viewer’s poison.

Like the rich food at restaurants aspiring to Michelin stars, every shot here might feel over-flavored for the Anderson-averse, prompting a sort of cinematic dyspepsia. By that logic, the movie’s brevity (40 minutes) might make for a more digestible snack, so even Anderson-phobes will perhaps find in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar a perfectly well-balanced reduction. It’s got most of Anderson’s signature flavor notes but in healthy, clarified stock.

Did you groove to his adaptation of British writer Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox? Well, this one is based on a Dahl short story from a collection more aimed at adults, and represents an adaptation more faithful to its original than Fox but still sieved through Anderson’s unique visual style. And while Russian doll-style, story-within-story construction is a recurrent feature in many of Anderson’s films, Dahl’s original text was written that way from the start.

This mise en abyme opens with a narrating Ralph Fiennes, star of The Grand Budapest Hotel, decked out to resemble a cardigan-clad Dahl himself, sitting in a replica of the writer’s own writing hut at his home, Gipsy House in Buckinghamshire. Looking straight into the camera, and smoothly mimicking Dahl’s slightly nasal English cadences, he explains how this will be a story about Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch, a new addition to Anderson’s ensemble of regular players). Henry is a perfectly ordinary scion of the British upper class, “wealthy because he had had a rich father who was now dead,” as Dahl describes him.

While browsing the library of a friend’s country house, Henry finds a handwritten account by an Indian doctor, Z.Z. Chatterjee (Dev Patel, who takes over narrational duties for a time), of a man named Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who claimed he “could see without his eyes.” This he proves to Chatterjee and his fellow doctors (including Richard Ayoade, who, like the other actors, takes several roles here) by correctly identifying how many fingers someone is holding up and riding a bike while having his eyes sealed up with bread dough and covered in layers of bandages. Khan then explains to the doctors how he learned how to see without using his eyes after years of practice under the tutelage of a yogi (Ayoade again) by simply concentrating on just one thing very hard, in his case the face of his dead brother.

With fearless symmetry, the narrative descends downstairs to Khan and the yogi’s stories, spends some time in a jungle represented by stage props and animated miniature tigers, and then it’s back up to Henry Sugar’s world. Deciding this seeing without using eyes would be a capital way to make a fortune at casinos, Henry puts all this energy into following the method laid out in the doctor’s account of Khan’s practice. But the very process of learning the craft itself changes him, and once he’s made a killing at Lord’s, his favorite casino (where Kinglsey is the blackjack dealer and pop singer Jarvis Cocker mans the door), he realizes he no longer wants the money so much.

In fact, like so many other Anderson protagonists, from Dignan (Owen Wilson) in his debut feature Bottle Rocket through Mr. Fox to the actors in Asteroid City, the big lesson learned is that it’s the process not the prize that counts — the journey, not the destination, and, as they like to say in cheesy adventure tales, the friends made along the way. A more generous interpretation would see in Henry Sugar and many of those other Anderson stories, an allegory about the primacy of craftsmanship itself as its own reward, even if the end result is revealed to be absurd and pointless.

This seems entirely fitting in a film where every prop leather book and elegantly piped pajama top, every old-school in-camera trick (there’s a bit of levitation at one point thanks to a mirrored box), and purr and tick of Alexandre Desplat’s rhythmic score is precisely measured, choreographed and designed. That sort of maniacal attention to detail may feel maddening to some viewers, but for fans there is an exquisite orderliness about the absurdity of Anderson’s miniature universe. If Asteroid City was a too-rich 20-course tasting menu, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a deliciously calibrated amuse-bouche.