Only Wes Anderson Could Have Adapted Roald Dahl This Way
Wes Anderson’s recent collection of Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix is so specifically theatrical that you could replicate each one on virtually any stage armed with just a small troupe of repertory actors and a meager budget. Characters narrate what’s happening while staring directly at us, the implied audience; obliging stagehands shift scenery and assist with costume changes and makeup right in front of our eyes. The action is so resolutely analog that it feels like a manifesto for good old-fashioned stagecraft in a cinematic era steamrolled by CGI—our imaginations are forced to fill in the gaps when, say, a train rushes right over a character, or a man appears to levitate several feet off the ground. This is storytelling that shows you all of its seams. The question is: Why?
And what are we even watching, anyway? Here we have one of: I had to search for the four shorts individually to watch them, even though Ralph Fiennes, playing Dahl, appears in each one, part avuncular host, part ferryman into the underworld of the author’s macabre imagination. These are easily the least twee works Anderson has ever made—there are no banjos, no pastel colors, scarcely a shred of disaffected existentialist whimsy. But there is a point behind the series, not unrelated to the foregrounding of Dahl. Throughout, Anderson jolts us in and out of the story, encouraging us to think actively and even skeptically about what it’s telling us.
