Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl adaptations

Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Currently streaming on Netflix are four films (The Ratcatcher, The Swan, Poison, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) that Wes Anderson has adapted from Roald Dahl short stories. They are a near perfect merger of Dahl's very English salt and vinegar with Anderson's very American pastel Easter egg sweetness. The English cast bites into the pungent dialogue and narration more entertainingly than the American ones in Anderson's previous Dahl adaptation, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The usual Anderson preoccupations are present,  but Dahl's prose has freed Anderson's imagination to concentrate on what really busts his buttons: the artifices designed to frame his cinematic fables. Anderson uses both theatrical effects (spotlights, actors addressing the audience, visible stagehands and set changes, scrims) and cinematic ones (tracking shots, CGI, split screens, odd camera angles) at the service of Dahl's words and vision. The narration of each film is foregrounded. Sometimes Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself , ensconced in his work office, narrates the action, but all members of the ensemble chime in, capturing the crackling vitality of Dahl's language. 

Dahl's darkly ironic view of life prevents Anderson from falling into the traps of his own fussiness and bloodlessness. Even Tim Burton has more Dionysus in him than Anderson, our most Apollonian filmmaker. The moments of death and loss in Anderson's films tend to end in the communal hug he thinks we all need. There is a short sharp shock of life and death in Dahl's work that strengthens Anderson's often anemic worldview. The characters in these short films seem to spring to life more than the caricatures in Asteroid City; and I enjoyed Asteroid City. I hope for more Dahl adaptations from Anderson, but I won't hold my breath for his version of Switch Bitch.