Fair Dahl

In adapting “Poison” and three other Roald Dahl stories for Netflix, director Wes Anderson may have finally found a desperately needed antidote. A solution, that is, to the self-indulgent quirkiness that has made some of his recent features irritating and hard at moments to sit through. When your running time is seventeen minutes and change, there is no room to fool around or show off. You’ve got a story to tell, the clock’s ticking, get down to the task at hand.

If the four films now airing on Netflix—“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher,” and “Poison”—offer vision along with gripping story in spite of their abbreviated durations, that is largely up to the peculiar genius of Dahl, not Anderson. They spring from the mind of one of the masters of the short story, and they are caustic, dark, witty, ironic, savagely funny.

Tellingly, the one entry here that runs a good deal longer than seventeen minutes, “Henry Sugar,” is the only one where playfulness for its own sake intrudes. The chance to take liberties and show how spontaneously creative he can be throws Anderson’s foibles as a director into relief and accentuates, as if we needed reminding, the imperative of keeping faithful to the great source material. Anderson, it seems, has not made up his mind about how conventionally he wants to narrate.

Sometimes he shows us events and at other times, characters walk around in front of the camera holding up props and telling us about the experiences they are having, rather than undergoing them before our eyes. Whether this is an avant garde technique or a reflection of the budget that Anderson had to work with hardly even matters. The flaws of “Henry Sugar” make the other three stand out all the more.

Not that “Henry Sugar” is bad. This is the tale of a con man who browses around in the vast library of a rich card-playing friend and comes by accident on a doctor’s account of a strange old man he met in India who could see without the use of his eyes. This adept learned extrasensory training from a yoga master he met in the wilds, and went on to astonish the crowds at circuses as well as large audiences of children. Then he died all too suddenly.

The con man grows convinced that he can learn the secret and, when visiting casinos, can turn the adage that no one ever beats the house on its head. But the chance to make piles of money using his ability to read cards without seeing them does not provide the lasting elation he thought it would. This is a world full of starving children and hospitals that can barely keep the lights on, as an angry policeman reminds him, and he, too, has a social conscience.

“Henry Sugar” recalls nothing so much as the W.W. Jacobs story “The Monkey’s Paw.” A greedy character messes with the order that has almost always prevailed in the world, with unpredictable consequences for himself and others. The parallel goes further: in the Jacobs story, the eponymous paw is the gift of a mystically endowed old man from India. A place that held out fascination for the British, or in Dahl’s case for the U.K.-born son of Norwegian parents.

For a Western power to meddle in the affairs of such a distant place, with so little understanding of its culture and ways, is to invite chaos and disruption on a mass scale, for which the weird events in “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” function as a kind of microcosm. But that is perhaps a more suitable topic for a dissertation or a multivolume series of books than a short review of what’s hot on Netflix this week.

Dahl could not shut out the call of India and all its beauty and mystery. “Poison” is the tale of what befalls a colonial administrator who becomes convinced that a deadly snake has slithered under his blanket and will deliver a fatal bite if he so much as moves or speaks too loudly. The colleague he summons to help him seeks out a doctor, who prepares an elaborate treatment for what may actually be an imaginary threat.

This intriguing little story and its ambiguous meaning have vexed readers and inspired debates for decades. A recent documentary about the late horror and fantasy author Karl Edward Wagner recounts an argument that the precocious writer-to-be had with a teacher, which led Wagner to write to Dahl himself seeking clarity. Wonder of wonders, Dahl took the time to write a personal reply to the query. The documentary does not name the Dahl work at the heart of the disagreement between Wagner and his teacher, but Wagner’s friend John Mayer says it was “Poison.”

An author with an imagination as restless as Dahl’s could hardly cease to challenge readers and jolt them out of their complacency. “The Rat Catcher” is about the eponymous worker-for-hire, who roams around to villages in the north of England looking for jobs. He has prominent front teeth, shaggy graying hair, and a generally scavenger-like mien. Upon finding his prey, he becomes so ferocious and brutal that he upsets his employers. The fact that this rat-catcher comes to resemble the beasts that people have hired him to hunt down evokes one of Nietzsche’s most famous aphorisms, about the risks of fighting monsters.

Maybe the bleakest short is “The Swan,” which purports to derive from a real event. Again we are in the north of England, where a pair of louts abduct a scrawny intellectual boy and subject him to torture and humiliation. They make him lie down on in the inside of a railroad track and try to stay flat enough that a train will pass over him. His miraculous survival leads only to his next trial. He must climb high up on a tree and then leap off one of the branches with the wings of the eponymous once-beautiful creature tied to his arms.

“The Swan” might be a parable about how limited and envious people mock and seek to sabotage the careers and lives of those with gifts and abilities they themselves lack. About the fate of talented and intelligent people in a world where the politically correct hold sway. Or it may simply be true crime smut. In any event, this narrative, like two of the other shorts, is too compact to allow Anderson to shoot himself in the foot with the appalling preciousness we find in works such as The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. He narrates a grim little tale and does it efficiently.

The general effectiveness of these four shorts is a testament to a writer who could tell powerful stories and knew how to be sly and cerebral with no pretension whatsoever. Roald Dahl has brought out the best in Wes Anderson and shown him how to make better films.