Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq on Unsplash
By Geoff Carter
Attribution: Swan on its nest by Sean Goodhart, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Taking Wing: Film Review of The Swan
The third in Wes Anderson’s quartet of Roald Dahl short story film adaptations is The Swan, a somewhat harrowing but inspirational tale of strength, resolution, and righteousness. In this tale, a young boy is set upon by two bullies who intimidate, beat, tie up, attack, torture, and even maim the smaller child, who despite the terrible hardships put upon him, refuses to show any fear or to give in to his tormentors. The tale resonates—like most of Dahl’s work—with the hidden terrors of childhood that lie just under the civilized veneer of society.
In this tale, which like all the other Dahl film adaptations done by Anderson, has an external narrator. In this case, he is played by Rupert Friend. He starts the story by describing Ernie, a young bully, who gets a rifle as a gift, and, along with his good friend Raymond, commences to kill every bird and animal he can lay eyes on. While rampaging through the English countryside, the two boys run across Peter Watson (Asa Jennings), a small bookish boy who happens to be out birdwatching. Peter has been bullied by these two before and knows (says the narrator) to keep his mouth shut. The boys take Peter’s binoculars, tie his hands together, and then get the idea of tying him onto some train tracks and hide in the bushes to see what will happen.
While lying on the tracks, Peter reasons that if he burrows his head into the gravel, he might get low enough to avoid the locomotive which will soon pass overhead. By doing that, and pigeon-toeing his feet, he manages to avoid getting squished. The courage and level-headedness of young Peter as he coolly watches the train approach and then pass over him is laudable.
But the bully boys are not finished. Seeing that Peter survived the train passing over him, they pick him up and drag him along until they come to a lake where they threaten to throw him in, but then suddenly, Ernie spies a swan sitting on a nest. Over Peter’s protests that the swan is a protected species and that killing one while sitting on a nest could jeopardize any cygnets that might be there, Ernie kills it and then forces Peter to retrieve the swan, which he does.
Afterwards, he defies the bullies, telling the boys their deed was “a filthy thing to do”. Ernie gets the bright idea of watching another swan fly. He cuts off the swan’s wings and ties them to Peter’s arms and orders him to climb a tall willow tree next to the lake. Peter complies, reasoning that the further away he is from the bullies, the better. When he reaches the highest branch, about fifty feet up, Ernie orders him to jump and fly. Peter of course refuses. Ernie takes aim and fires a shot over the boy’s head. He still refuses to jump. The next shot hits Peter in the leg and he begins to lose his balance.
At this point, in the film, the narration switches from Guest and reverts to Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes) in his studio. Fiennes’ Dahl is a recurring character we’ve seen before in this series both in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and The Ratcatcher. He appears in this tale, quite unexpectedly, as Peter is on the cusp of losing his balance and falling off his branch. Here Fienne’s Dahl quotes directly from his story, stating that Peter saw a great white light and dived toward it, and that some people are unconquerable. The narrative switches again to Friend, who tells of three people who saw a great flying swan overhead before Mrs. Watson sees Peter land in her back garden. When Mrs. Watson goes to her son, it is now Friend playing him, obviously recalling the incident from memory.
While the story itself reaches into the fantastical—or magical realism—at the end, Anderson’s treatment of Dahl’s harrowing but inspirational tale is staged on an unreal or meta-realistic plane from the very beginning. Many of the sets are designed as corridors through which the characters pass, walking through doors that unexpectedly open. Instead of the wide-open English countryside in which the story is set, the viewer is placed into narrow, claustrophobic space—perhaps intended to reflect Peter’s feelings of anxiety and fear as he is trapped by the two bigger boys.
The characters of Ernie and Raymond are not listed as being played by actors. Instead, stagehands sometimes stand in for these characters, and sometimes young Peter mimes the actions described by the narrator. Their dialogue is read directly by the narrator. The absence of these little monsters from the story results in a sense of them being abstractions, mere problems for young Peter to solve. There is never any sense in the story of him feeling for himself—he is only apprehensive about the swan.
The doors in the sets, which open up to different scenes in the narrative—scenes which are largely left up to the viewers to create in their imaginations—serve the same function as turning a page. Early on, Ernie goes through a door, and we enter upon a scene where Peter is watching a woodpecker. Very much like The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar or The Ratcatcher, The Swan is structured much more like a theatrical play or a storybook than like a film. The director also, by inserting Mr. Dahl in each of these narratives, never let us forgets who the true author is. Wes Anderson seems determined to reshape cinematic narrative, transcending (while ironically compressing space and depth within the frame) its traditional realistic narrative tradition.
In another director’s hands, these stories would not have seemed as if they were lifted directly from a storybook complete with painted sets that accent the flat depth of a printed page and contrived compositions of a children’s book illustrator. There is really nothing very real about these films; of course, there is not much realistic about these stories (although both Henry Sugar and The Swan were based on news clippings Dahl had in his idea book), but another director might have shot The Ratcatcher at an actual farm or The Swan in a wide-open countryside, but what Anderson accomplishes is truly epic—he forces the viewer to function much as a reader does. In these films, and in a very similar to some of Anderson’s other works like The French Dispatch or Fantastic Mr. Fox, the passive viewer becomes very much like an active reader, forced to make connections between characters or imagine physical spaces or connect disparate narratives.
The Swan is in many ways a heartbreaking story, but one which is particularly inspiring. Poor abused Peter will not give in to the forces of evil and oppression surrounding him. Instead, he uses his mind and his spirit to escape and overcome them. In light of society’s fractious contentiousness, naked hate speech, and the aggressive bullying recently seen in our highest office, The Swan offers an important lesson, that reason trumps fear, calm trumps panic, and righteousness, given the right backing, will win. The storybook aura of this short film is the perfect vehicle with which to deliver this message. After all, we should have learned it as children.
This collection of stories has been perfectly transcribed to film by Mr. Anderson. They are poignant, whimsical, fantastic, surreal, yet harrowingly realistic and completely frightening. They are a perfect slice of childhood.