Whimsy and Despair in Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl
This year, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Wes Anderson won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. Henry Sugar is one of four new Anderson short films, along with The Swan, Poison, and The Rat Catcher. All films adapt short stories by the British writer Roald Dahl, who is best known for his ironic, bitterly funny children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. Anderson’s obsessively choreographed style seems to contradict Dahl’s chaotic sense of humor, but both Anderson and Dahl use whimsical, colorful veneers to disguise their narratives’ secret bleakness, which is why they work so well together.
Take Matilda and The Grand Budapest Hotel. At first glance, Matilda is a charming story about a precocious girl with telepathic powers. But it’s also about domestic violence and powerlessness. It reads like an abuse victim’s fantasy, as Matilda’s telepathy allows her to fight her parents and rescue her beloved Miss Honey. But even though Matilda ends happily, it’s a poignant story because real life never resolves so easily and victims aren’t always saved. The Grand Budapest Hotel, like Matilda, is a superficially low-stakes fantasy. Its faux-vintage, twee aesthetic constantly reassures the audience that the heroes will be okay. But in the film’s last twenty minutes, history intrudes, as Nazis kill Monsieur Gustave and Agatha dies of the Spanish flu. Happy endings never last long, says The Grand Budapest Hotel; sooner or later, reality ruins them.
Incorporating painted backdrops and stagehands, Anderson’s four new shorts resemble theater productions more than films. Instead of progressing the narrative with blocking or dialogue, the shorts have live narrators who directly address the audience and quote verbatim from Dahl’s stories. These techniques, which expose the artifice behind filmmaking, also imitate the effect of written words on readers’ imaginations. The films suggest, rather than depict, settings and events, creating the impression that they’re unfolding in our imagination as we flip through the pages of these stories.
Out of these four new adaptations, The Swan most adeptly synthesizes style and content. It’s Anderson’s darkest film, telling the story of Peter Watson, a young boy who’s bullied to the brink of death by two older boys, Ernie and Raymond. First, they tie Peter to train tracks, where a passing train barely misses him. Then they kill a swan, tie its wings to Peter’s arms, and force him to “fly” from a tree at gunpoint. The Swan’s aesthetic is bare, with a white backdrop, minimal sets, and four actors: young Peter Watson, an older Peter Watson who narrates the short, a stagehand, and the author. Crucially, Anderson never depicts Ernie and Raymond on screen. He implies their presence and actions through the older Peter’s narration. We never see Ernie and Raymond shoot the swan or cut its wings off– we only see Peter and the robotic stagehand reenact these events. As a result, The Swan feels abstract and sinister, as if Peter’s too traumatized to fully recount the story. The film’s minimalism leaves the audience to imagine the torture and its perpetrators, creating an aura of invisible evil.
There’s no charm, color, or whimsy in The Swan. It’s Anderson’s style stripped of artifice, leaving only the bleakness behind. That’s why it’s the most successful of these short films: it’s the most brutal. It exposes the despair at the core of Anderson’s and Dahl’s stories as a timeless, imageless, and wordless violence that strikes deep into our hearts.