The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson’s new picture is a dreary shoebox of tired humour and business meetings with little excitement to its tasteless caper.

Benicio Del Toro is Zsa Zsa Korda, a ruthless business tycoon set on building a large industrial complex in the Eastern Mediterranean which will be his “most important project”, if he can survive the multiple assassination attempts by his competitors. Korda recruits his estrange devout nun daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) into his business plan to make her his protégé and heir to his fortune. Despite sour resentment from Liesl for her father’s hostility and greed, she agrees to join him to meet with a parade of business partners to negotiate the shared investment into their complex, accompanied by the squeaking presence of Korda’s private educator on insects, Bjørn Lund played by Michael Cera. In episodic structure, revolving around uniform shoeboxes that represent different aspects of Korda’s plan, Korda and Liesl move from one chaotically chivalrous meeting after the other, encountering characters like Reagan and Leland, played by Tom Hanks, and Bryan Cranston who choose to resolve their conflicts with a dignified two-on-two basketball game, Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) a Rick’s Café style club owner who gets his ceiling shot at by freedom fighter Sergio (Richard Ayoade), and a climatic confrontation with Korda’s half brother Uncle Nubar played with beardy villainy by Benedict Cumberbatch.

This is very familiar Anderson territory, from egotistical philanthropy, broken families, with all the dead pan humour, symmetrical framing, and impossibly decorative production design we have come to expect, consequently it is all too familiar. With Del Toro’s Korda resembling the similar and superior family businessman in Gene Hackman’s Royal Tennenbaum trying to redeem his selfish squandering and reunite his alienated children, met with a farcical caper of great fortune that is reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). It is all playing second to none to his previous work as Anderson can’t breathe new life to his tired formula that is beginning to marginalise his own style.

What continues to defeat Anderson’s format is the contrast between how stilted he draws his characters and yet tries to inject some meaningful emotional core to their story so as to make them more human. He got away with it with the Tennebaums and Monsieur Gustave, though the main difference being is that the formers had a singular charm and likeability to their characters that has been absent from many Anderson casts of recent. The underlying theme in The Phoenician Scheme is a redemptive father-daughter relationship which would be moving if it wasn’t for the disconnected reality in which Anderson’s characters roam. Del Toro is doing solid work in a Charles Foster Kane meets Clark Gable kind of arrogance, who drops occasionally witty lines, which goes head-to-head with Mia Threapleton’s fearlessly stern condemnations to her father’s actions, but it still doesn’t make the viewer care about their relationship. The most comfortable presence comes from Michael Cera who is perfectly cast for an Anderson picture, bringing an adorably awkward placement at the edge of each frame in an ironically cartoonish array.

One rare exception is the Phoenician Scheme does not indulgently position its story in any other fictitious context such as a play, or book, which is a usual Anderson device, but instead we are thrown straight into the action from the very first plane crash. Korda’s meetings are repeatedly interrupted by many near death experiences that transport his consciousness to a black and white afterlife where he finds himself on trial for his life and crimes, judged by some familiar Anderson cast members wearing saintly white gowns and long beards. Though this spiritual journey turns these sequences into brief momentary bouts of absurdity traded for any genuine soulful enlightenment.

For Anderson fans, who love his exhaustive indulgent writing, and eccentric ensemble characters, I have no doubt will still eat this entry up, but the worst to be said about the Phoenician Scheme is how boring it is for an Anderson film. Even the signature lavish production design from Adam Stockhausen is blandly muted with world building far more restrictive to pale interiors, this is one of the major displeasures as even if Anderson writes an annoyingly pompous film, to gaze at the brightly coloured sets and tapestry becomes the main lasting pleasure to be had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuMnPl2WI4