Adaptation and verbatim narration in "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar"
Oscars series pt. 2
This is the second installment of my ongoing Oscars series. You can find part 1, about “Zone of Interest,” here. Please enjoy and remember to subscribe :)
Many people describe Wes Anderson’s movies as having a “picture book” quality. Every cute, meticulously composed frame looks like a picture out of a story for kids. Others describe them as little dioramas, the one a small student would present to his 4th grade class. And his films are infused with the voice of this clever little kid. There are also, of course, many spunky children in his movies but even the adults often talk and behave like children. One can imagine a 10 year old looking up from his library book to make some sort of snarky remark to his sister. That snarky remark would probably fit right in with the dialogue of an Anderson film, perhaps delivered by Ralph Fiennes or Bill Murray.
It comes as no surprise then, that Anderson chose to adapt a series of stories from the kid’s author Roald Dahl. The longest of them, “The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar,” is up for best live action short at the Oscars this year. It tells the story of the titular character, who discovers a book about a man who can see the world without eyes and learns his ways. He develops the same trick and uses it to win gains at the casino, ultimately deciding to use the money to found hospitals. This is Anderson’s second attempt at the work of Dahl after his 2009 version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Dahl’s work is full of quirky characters that fit right into the Wes Anderson cinematic universe. What’s more, Roald Dahl has a similar authorial voice as Anderson, with its dry humor, its absurdity, and its nod to the smart aleck 10 year olds reading his books. While both the story and the film versions of “The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar” are targeted towards older audiences, that voice is still there.
What does come as a surprise, though, is Anderson’s decision to lift large, verbatim swaths of the text for the movie— and to have the characters deliver the narration directly to the audience (the way a writer speaks to a reader from the page). It’s a unique and delightful choice that makes a lot of sense for Anderson. But, watching it, I had to ask myself: “Why?” Why make this choice for an adaptation? Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the two artists have such similar voices. What I think is more interesting, however, is that this choice is the perfect way for Anderson to not only capture the essence of the story but also evolve it into his own thing.
In adapting a story for a film, you’re not just translating the text into images. You’re trying to capture the essence of the text. Film is a unique medium that conveys stories through different devices than those of a written work. Film has cross dissolves and visual composition whereas a written work has the syntax of sentences and poetic images left up for readers to complete in their minds. They key is to use film’s unique devices to capture the same essence a text captures using its own. We’re probably all familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave and the idea that the things we see in the world are only shadows of “True Forms” up in the heavens. Films, short stories, all artworks, are not true forms themselves but rather more like fingers pointing towards something in the heavens (or in our minds, perhaps our collective unconscious). They are media. In adapting a story into a film, you’re trying to point your finger towards the same thing the story points to.
But even that is not all that you’re doing. It can’t be. The original text was written by the original author. You can both point at the same thing but you are two separate people. The best you can do is point at the same thing from different angles— or maybe you can get up really close to each other and lay your finger on top of his so that you’re almost exactly pointing at something from the same angle but even then it’s only ever almost exact— not to mention uncomfortable (one might imagine the author saying “Please step away from me, sir. You can point at it perfectly well from over there.”)
And, ironically, Anderson manages to point at the essence of the story from his own, unique point of view despite the fact that he uses large swaths of the exact text. In fact, it’s not just despite that. It is largely because he uses Dahl’s exact words that he makes the film entirely his own. It is a quirky and absurd choice. I particularly like the moments when a character will be talking with another character and interrupt their speech by spiking the camera to add dialogue tags. In one scene, a doctor played by Dev Patel is talking with another doctor played by Richard Ayoade. “[To Ayoade] ‘I’m going back to the theater tonight,’ [camera spike] I said, [to Ayoade] ‘We can’t lose him now.’” These moments contribute to the presentational quality of the film. The characters are both in the world of the film and aware of you, the spectator. This presentational quality is quintessentially Wes Anderson— recall the diorama analogy earlier. It is also in the spirit of the original story, which is told through a frame narrative. The narrator relates the story of Henry Sugar, who discovers the story of Dr. Chatterjee [Patel], who discovers the story of Imdad Khad [Ben Kingsley], who discovers the instruction of an old yogi master. These layers of storytelling lean into that presentational quality. Anderson also expands on the frames by adding another one encompassing all of them: he puts Roald Dahl himself into the story, who has a moment in the beginning where he details a little bit about his writing process at Gipsy House. The extra frame acts as a little homage to Dahl in combination with using so much of Dahl’s exact words. The homage demonstrates that Anderson is not just stealing Dahl’s words but expanding on them. The way he uses those words is audacious and clever, which fits right into both the artists’ authorial voices.
What can we take from this? One thing that comes to mind is that, in adapting a story for film, it’s okay to break some rules, especially if that’s in service of the work you’re adapting. Earlier, I said that an adaptation should use the unique devices of film to convey a written work. Anderson does follow this “rule” through his film devices such as his visually striking set designs. But he also breaks this rule in other ways. One extrapolation of the rule could be to not use large swaths of the original work. You might be advised not to add a character’s internal monologue via voice over, using a paragraph of text from the original work. Instead, you might be advised to attempt to show the ideas of the internal monologue visually. That would be keeping in line with the rule— but Anderson breaks that rule here. And it works. It’s a clever little trick that fits right in line with the tricks Henry Sugar pulls when he’s at the casino. It gets at the essence. That is the important thing to never lose sight of.