‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review – It’s What You Expect, A Wes Anderson Movie
Wes Anderson has a new movie out. It piqued my interest as a cinephile and reviewer, so I felt the need to give it my attention. Anderson is regarded in a few circles, including film studies and pseudo academia, as one of the few and distinguished modern auteurs. Michael Bay falls into that category, too, and somehow Spielberg doesn’t, but that’s another conversation.
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Like the late David Lynch, every Anderson film has a signature style of acting, story, or design you can identify as pure Wes Anderson, even if you only see one frame or a couple of scenes. Whether it’s The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, or The Grand Budapest Hotel, you can see they are very similar in many ways. They are alike in their permutation of genre (comedy) and often have the same cast members. Bill Murray, for one, is in almost every Anderson film, and The Phoenician Scheme is no different.
However, he isn’t the star. The film stars Benicio Del Toro as robber baron industrialist Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda, who has big plans for a desert nation in need of infrastructure. That would be “Phoenicia” and the scheme hinted at by the title. But you know how these things go; setting his plans in motion will not be easy. Someone is out to get Korda, but they can’t get the job done. He survives every assassination attempt and bit of sabotage thrown at him, although he always winds up short of a plane and a pilot.
He has to prepare for the inevitable and pass his operations to an eligible heir. He has ten kids, nine of them sons in an ersatz Italian boarding school, but he only trusts one: his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). The problem is she is a nun in the making, and didn’t inherit her father’s amoral world view. There’s also a question of her paternity. She may be Korda’s daughter, or it could be her uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Zsa-Zsa’s half-brother, or rather, “The son of my father, your uncle Nubar.”
The Phoenician Scheme is about as “Grand” to look at as the Budapest Hotel and just as whimsically zany as Life Aquatic. Every auteur is guilty of making the same movie or the same kind of movie twice, even Hitchcock. That creates the detectable pattern that identifies an auteur, like fingerprints or DNA. Wes Anderson is known for his lavish mise-en-scene, depth of field, and careful framing of his camera’s subjects. Additionally, his characters often possess quirks and secrets.
Korda keeps his secrets, plans, papers, and connections in shoeboxes that set up each stop in the story and guide the semi-episodic narrative. When he and Liesl get to a railroad tunnel to broker a deal with partners played by Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, he settles a dispute with an impromptu game of basketball that goes poorly for him since Hanks and Cranston actually know how to play.
Liesl usually sits on the sidelines for each of these blunders, while bonding with the suspicious tagalong on the mission – an entomologist named Bjorn (Michael Cera). She acts as Korda’s moral compass while slowly losing her innocence in small ways. She never tasted alcohol until she had three beers with Bjorn; she loosened up more after that. She might also suffer from a faith that is imperfect, or pretend, which doesn’t help as she is constantly hit with a few crises of conscience. She prays, she verbally forgives, and a lot of it is an act. Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
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This is the kind of thing you see in a movie like Dr. Strangelove, which is one of Anderson’s inspirations. He’s inspired by several films of that age, including The Apartment, and films of the French New Wave such as The 400 Blows. You could guess that any one of those films, especially Strangelove, is a blueprint for his style, and you’d probably be right. It’s hard not to see the influence of directors like Kubrick, Billy Wilder, and Francois Truffaut in Anderson’s work. I also hazard a guess that he has a fondness for Peter Sellers and Jack Lemmon.
He elevates his cinema to actual art or something close to it, and he deserves awards and nominations for that. However, his films are an acquired taste. Anderson appeals to certain people, mostly the cinephile and academic crowd I addressed earlier. They showed up (though not en masse) and had a good laugh. I laughed a few times and enjoyed a few things, but got bored with it halfway through.
Phoenician Scheme isn’t a long movie, but it drags between comedic scenarios. It’s definitely more memorable than a lot of Anderson films I’ve seen, although there’s a chance I’ll forget more of it in time. Except for this: Did you wonder who Bill Murray played? It’s God – Murray is God (on film, of course).
The Phoenician Scheme
PROS
- Benicio Del Toro
- Mia Threapleton
- Set design and camera work
- Out-of-body scenes where Korda meets God and Heaven's court.
CONS
- Slow in spots
- Liesl's subplot and portrayal by Threapleton borders on total mockery that drags the film down
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