The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar:
There are ways in which a tale could be told, as in, it could literally be 'told', or alternatively, shown. But what happens when it chooses to do none, or both, at the same time? What kind of convoluted concoction does it create? Wes Anderson chose to explore precisely this phenomenon within the 39 minutes of 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar'; with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the titular character as perfectly as the minutely trimmed thin moustache sitting above his upper lip.
As an adaptation of Roald Dahl's (played by Ralph Fiennes) short story of the same name, the plot explores the story of the men who could "see without their eyes", a testament to Kashmir born magician Khuda Bakhsh in the 1950s. Ben Kingsley as Amjad Khan is of course a not-so-surprising select, as is Dev Patel in the role of Dr. Chatterjee. However, this story is about none of them, or yet again, about all of them, for all of them are represented by Henry Sugar, and is much more about his transition than of anyone else, and thus culmination of the transitive journey of all. Anderson chooses to employ a Russian doll structure to encapsulate his narrative, there's a story, within a story, within a story that takes place, and surprisingly all of it finds their own in due accord.
So far however, it's still basic filmmaking, and that's where Anderson steps in. He explores the inner conundrums of human psyche through the portrayal of his characters, especially by making them narrators of their own tale, each specifically the protagonist of their own narrative, and yet leaves a page behind for the audience to formulate their own opinions only to be later conflicted and pondered upon. 2D sets and structures, a surrealist use of exorbitant constant contrasting shades of colour and varied tonal range, Henry Sugar is just like the audience, and yet so much more than the audience. And of course it does have the tinge of stereotypical breezy Dahl in it, especially with the moralistic rhetoric that eventually pushes through, and there're already too many of Dahl's stories at this point doing the same. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar then is a tale to be told not because it hasn't been told before, rather, the method of expression is to be observed, it's upon the bard to burrow into the beauteous biography-like structure, for else wise, the tale may get stale, and in the words of Dahl the narrator:
"Nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want."











