The Swan (2023)

Wes Anderson's "The Swan" arrives as one of four Roald Dahl adaptations released in 2023, a short film of admirable brevity concerning two large and ignorant bullies who pursue a small and brilliant boy across a stretch of English countryside. The narration is delivered with the usual Andersonian composure. A rifle appears. A swan appears. The boy endures. It is a story about cruelty and survival, told in miniature, and it has no interest whatsoever in the cultural questions of its own moment.

This is not a complaint. The cast includes Eliel Ford, a Black actor, among the bullies, which lends the small ensemble a measure of diversity. The screenplay does nothing with it. Race is never raised, examined, or acknowledged, and the same can be said of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment. There are no female characters of consequence. There is no critique of wealth. The contrast between the oversized bullies and the undersized protagonist is a matter of Dahl's cruel arithmetic, not a statement about bodies. The boy is called brilliant, and the film lets that stand as a fact of his character, not a diagnosis.

The ledger, then, is thin. This is an adaptation faithful to its source, uninterested in sermonizing, with a narrator who tells a story instead of delivering a position paper. Whatever social consciousness can be located here is confined to the quiet fact of a diverse face in a minor role. Anderson has made something small, precise, and nearly free of the era's editorial instincts. We should note it, file it, and move on.