Wes Anderson's Dahl-House (Patreon)

Fucking Netflix. If 32 minutes of underbaked Almodóvar can open in commercial cinemas, then surely 91 minutes of Wes Anderson material, all based on Roald Dahl stories and all completely consistent stylistically (although I guess that's a given) merits similar treatment. But as we know, theatrical for Netflix is not even loss leader. It's ideological anathema. Anyway, let's look at the films, shall we?

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

Probably the best of the lot by most metrics (although not my personal favorite), Henry Sugar benefits from a clear "Dutch-dahl" structure, with a story within the story, along with authorial intrusions and commentary. Henry (Benedict Cumberbatch) excels at playing a generic waxworks playboy who gradually becomes a bona fide human being, much to his own surprise. Now we know full well that Wes has a strange jones for Indian culture, but here he mostly avoids Orientalism by placing the nested tale of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley) firmly in the colonial past. Given the coexistence of British and Indian doctors at the hospital, Henry Sugar shows Khan's spiritual quest as something both profound and hopelessly relegated to the past. When Henry achieves a similar "enlightenment," it is completely at odds with the Western capitalist world he inhabits, and this precipitates his crisis. As the outer narrative shell, Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) in his writing hut offers his own unlikely revelation. He can hardly stand that he's written a story about a good man doing a good deed, but feels honor-bound to stick to the "facts." 

Poison (2023)

Arguably as vile and useless as Henry Sugar is surprisingly warm, Poison shows Anderson expending a lot of admittedly deft formal maneuvering -- shifting walls, overtly bizarre camera placement, and above all, the recumbent Cumberbatch holding down the lower third of the frame -- on a story that's little more than a vulgar racist gag. Dahl, no doubt, thinks he is offering a critique of British arrogance, but since we know nothing about these characters, it hardly seems sincere. Some commentators think that Harry Pope (Cumberbatch) reading The Golden Lotus is meaningful, a signal of the man's fetishistic limitations. Maybe.

The Rat Catcher (2023)

One of the most impressive aspects of all these Dahl films is Anderson's ability to put narrators onscreen and in the middle of the action, without it seeming clunky or anti-cinematic. This in part has to do with Anderson's affinity for Dahl's prose, how it is markedly different from his own screenwriting but can be convincingly delivered with the usual Wes-World lilt. Probably the neatest aspect of The Rat Catcher, apart from Anderson momentarily dipping back into claymation, is Richard Ayoade's crisp delivery of the story itself while also convincingly occupying the role of a secondary observer of the unappetizing hijinks of the rat man (Fiennes). But really, this is a story that has exactly one idea, which Dahl himself seemed to realize, since he put it right in the dialogue. Obsessives always become their own worst enemy.

The Swan (2023)

My personal favorite of the tetralogy, The Swan displays Dahl's usual misanthropy but plays it for unleavened tragedy. It's one of the first times I'm aware of that Wes-World has squared off against Trump-World, where ignorant people with a modicum of power take perverse delight in destroying beauty, intelligence, and hope. This is also the film that takes the most liberties with the role of the narrator (Rupert Friend), since he usually seems separated from the story by time ("I am Peter Watson"), but there is a fluidity between his onscreen identity and that of young Peter Watson (Asa Jennings), such that sometimes the young child seems less like a character in memory and more like a prop. Also, on a formal level, The Swan is quite impressive. Anderson's use of phony wheat-field flats, miniatures, forced perspective, and portals that allow performers to enter and exit the frame, all provide Brechtian distance even as the story demands an almost visceral engagement. The cruel irony of the conclusion ("I am going to win") stings like a motherfucker.