This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Wes Anderson’s second short adaptation of Roald Dahl’s work, the swan, follows young Peter Watson as he survives being bullied and tormented by two older bullies. The inspiration for which Dahl had found in a newspaper article 30 years prior to him writing the original short story.
While incredibly short, at only 17 minutes long, The Swan provides the full Wes Anderson experience. From colorful, symmetrical set design to his signature monotone, deadpan delivery from his actors. Unfortunately, unlike the previous film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, this style doesn’t resonate as well in The Swan. I just felt wholly less engaged in this one.
This can mostly be attributed to the strange decision to have Rupert Friend’s narrator explain the entire story while showing very little of it. So little, in fact, that we only see the bullies in a few shots. Friend, instead, narrates their voices as well as their actions, telling the audience what is happening instead of showing it for the most part.
It felt very similar to what it feels like to sit in an elementary school classroom and have the teacher read a picture book to the students. We get shots that illustrate briefly what the narrator is reading, but we have to imagine most of it.
I wish we had actually seen the events play out. Obviously, they were not worried about the runtime, so it’s curious they decided to avoid it altogether.
In addition, the deadpan delivery just really doesn’t work all that well for me and I wish it had been done differently. The characters are interesting enough that I really would have enjoyed seeing their emotions on screen.
Final Thoughts
Honestly you can skip The Swan. Anderson proves yet again he is a master of set design, and the idea to turn the short story into a stage play that gets put on screen is unique and intelligent enough to work in short film format. It just didn’t grab me enough to be interesting and the idea of narrating the story just felt like a wasted opportunity. You can read the book instead for the same effect.
