The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

The final, and longest, film in the package of Academy Award-nominated live action short films this year was The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

The film is fun, crisply-paced, well-acted, thoroughly professional from start to finish. It is a complex story, told in an interestingly unconventional, yet not thereby objectionably obscure, manner. It feels like the kind of film that would be popular with the public, and perhaps even more so with critics.

All that being said, I didn’t enjoy it to all that great a degree. It’s decent, I didn’t hate it by any means, but it feels like a great deal of effort for a story that is OK at best. I just never cared more than modestly about this film as I watched it, never felt it had a lot of meaning for me.

It is based on a short story by Roald Dahl. (After the fact, I read a summary of the short story. If anything, it is even more complex than the film, with more twists and turns than the film includes, and with what sound like some darker elements.)

The film version starts with (an actor playing) Dahl himself creating the story, so it operates on a meta level in postmodern fashion. He appears later as well.

Though, as I say, the film does not contain everything that the Dahl short story does, the style they chose for the film creates the impression that they’re basically reading the story word-for-word. For example, a character will say “Lester ascended the stairs and banged on the door at the top” while we watch the other character (Lester) do just that. The Lester character will then say, “Let me in!” to which the other character appends, “he demanded.”

As for the story proper, most of the first half of it occurs in India. At the heart of this portion of the story is an Indian man named Imdad (Gandhi’s Ben Kingsley). As a boy, he had run away to join a traveling circus. There he heard about a great guru with seemingly supernatural powers, like levitation. He left the circus temporarily to seek out this guru to see if he could learn any great abilities from him. Initially the guru wanted nothing to do with him, but eventually Imdad’s pestering wore him down until he agreed to take him on as a disciple and to train him to “see” without using his eyes, warning him that success would require many, many years of diligent mind-training through advanced meditation techniques.

It was every bit that grueling a process, but ultimately Imdad was able to perceive visual information even when fully blindfolded. He became one of the greatest marvels of the circus.

His practice when traveling the country performing was at each stop to first go to a hospital or doctor’s office to request that they expertly blindfold him so that it will be impossible for him to see with his eyes, and then to test him to verify that he still is able to see in spite of that.

On one such occasion, a doctor, initially understandably highly skeptical of Imdad as surely a fakir scam artist, becomes fascinated by him when he passes all the tests with ease and the doctor is compelled to concede that he is legit. He learns all he can of Imdad’s life story, what he does, and how he does it, but this process is abruptly brought to an end when Imdad suddenly dies. The doctor publishes a book with as much information as he was able to gather, including the techniques the guru taught Imdad that enabled him to see without his eyes.

The scene shifts. A rich young man named Henry Sugar (though not really named that, it is explained, as that is a pseudonym), who is described as neither a particularly good man nor a particularly bad man, but more kind of an idle rich zero who has no goals beyond making more money—that he doesn’t need—for sport, is browsing through the books in a library in a home he is visiting.

Sugar comes upon the obscure book by the Indian doctor about Imdad. He is inspired by what he reads. Finally he has something he can wholeheartedly throw himself into as he seeks to train his mind as Imdad did.

Though it takes him several years of painstaking work, of long hours of disciplined concentration, he succeeds in acquiring supernatural powers of vision, not just to see through blindfolds, but to see through objects and see the opposite sides of objects as if he were perceiving from a different perspective. Indeed, he acquires his abilities even more quickly than Imdad had, in the amount of time that the guru had told Imdad that only one person in a billion could develop such vision skills.

He hones his skills to where he can see the hidden sides of cards in a casino, which enables him to win large sums of money at will. Which is nice, but not all that fulfilling relative to all the time he put in.

On one occasion he simply throws all the money he has won over a balcony into the street (it’s not like it’ll be difficult to replace it when he wants to), causing those below to scramble madly for it. A policeman, responding to the bedlam, chastises Sugar and tells him that if he wants to give money away, surely he can find a more constructive, charitable, way to do it.

Sugar takes this to heart. He decides that what he would really like to do is to fund orphanages and schools all over the world for poor children.

Now he can travel about from casino to casino (strategically limiting his win at each so as not to draw too much scrutiny and suspicion) with greater enthusiasm, with greater purpose. In the end, he does indeed exercise the great philanthropy that he intended.

It’s a cute story, and there’s no denying that it’s conveyed on film in a clever manner. But again, it’s a lot of effort for what feels like a pretty lightweight, albeit quite complex, tale. So, for me, it’s just pretty good.

The overall package of five Oscar nominees in this category was strong enough that, even though I liked this one some, I would rank it fifth out of five.

So, of course, it’s the one that won.