REVIEW: ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ asks Wes Anderson to expand his borders
Benecio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera in The Phoenician Scheme, written and directed by Wes Anderson.
Maybe more so than most other American filmmakers, Wes Anderson has never abandoned short films. For him, shorts are not merely a stepping stone, as they’re generally seen in the industry. He’s made companion pieces to his existing features (Hotel Chevalier is a prequel to The Darjeeling Limited), and standalone stories like Castello Cavalcanti, films that often double as extended commercials for luxury brands like Prada. He likes the format enough that he made a quartet of shorts for Netflix in 2023 based on works by Roald Dahl, starting with the The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - so far, the only film Anderson has won an Oscar for.
So it’s not surprising that Anderson’s latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme, bears a close technical and stylistic resemblance to his Netflix shorts. Apparently, there’s something about the structure of a short that Anderson finds compelling; even his other recent features have aspects of the format, like the anthology framing of The French Dispatch and the nested metanarrative of Asteroid City. The only question, though, is whether the rigidity of Anderson’s stagey compositions and the constant chapter breaks in The Phoenician Scheme have gotten a little stale. Is it time for him and his team to switch back to something with a little more flow?
Scarlett Johansson as Cousin Hilda, leader of a desert outpost.
The Phoenician Scheme is instantly recognizable to fans: the story follows Zsa-zsa Korda (Benecio Del Toro), “one of the richest men in Europe” in 1950, and his attempt to set up some kind of utopian infrastructure project in the titular region, despite countless enemies trying to stop him. The movie is basically another series of interconnected shorts, with Korda travelling around with his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and private tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera) to patch together his fraying business alliance before someone assassinates him. The usual Andersonian deadpan humour (“Help yourself to a hand grenade.”), chic fashion and design, and visual gags ensue, delivered by yet another massive supporting cast.
Anderson has been refining the visual sensibility seen in The Phoenician Scheme for years, with each successive film feeling like a slightly more concentrated version of what came before. It’s a style that has its detractors, and I doubt Anderson will ever swing back to something resembling a “normal” indie film - to say nothing of the weirdos who believe he’d ever make a Star Wars or Lord of the Rings film. But even I, as a long-time fan of Anderson, found myself feeling a little claustrophobic during this latest release. As much as I love the filmmaker’s style, the world of Zsa-zsa Korda felt like it deserved a little more freedom, with more location shooting in the model of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or Moonrise Kingdom.
Korda’s story is broken up into “shoeboxes” - don’t ask why - each relating to a deal he’s done to fund part of his dream project. Within each of these chapters, we meet a few members of the starry cast: in one, Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston play a pair of basketball-obsessed American brothers; in another, Scarlett Johansson appears as a Korda second cousin who Zsa-zsa has to marry for contractual reasons; in another, Richard Ayoade is a gun-toting Communist revolutionary holding Mathieu Amalric’s French nightclub for ransom.
Richard Ayoade as a Communist revolutionary.
These moments all work fine on their own, but it’s hard to shake the sense that the scenes could have just as easily been released as individual episodes in some kind of anthology series on a streaming service. There’s no opportunity for any of these characters to interact and bounce off each other, which might have helped balance out the dense, rapid-fire dialogue and two-dimensional blocking.
Some critics have described this movie as one of Anderson’s most emotional films, maybe due to the evolution in the relationship between Korda and Liesl. They start out barely knowing each other, but this slowly softens as the adventure continues, and the characters realize that they each have lessons to learn from the other. Korda needs to become more of a humanist, and Liesl (as a novitiate nun) needs to see the problems with the institution of the Church. For me, though, the dryness of the performances overwhelms the emotion. I generally love deadpan comedy, but here it’s almost weapons-grade.
Anderson does use two elements to cut through the tension. Since Korda is often the target of assassination attempts, his brushes with death transport him to something resembling Heaven, rendered in black and white. The editing and cinematography here evoke avant-garde filmmakers like Buñuel, Dreyer, and Bergman - a welcome shift in the vibe. Then there’s Michael Cera’s performance as Bjorn, who feels more like a character from Anderson’s earlier films and less “on rails” compared to the other characters. Without Cera, the movie may well have collapsed inward under the weight of all the Andersonian flourishes.
Can I recommend The Phoenician Scheme to average moviegoers? Not really. Unfortunately for the movie’s financiers, this release will probably only appeal to Anderson die-hards. As far as the director’s recent films go, it’s more compelling than The French Dispatch, but colder and less memorable than Asteroid City (one of my favourites from 2023). It might finally be time for the filmmaker to branch back out. As unique as these films can be compared to those made by other folks, there’s a reason that the ones from the 2000s and 2010s are among the filmmaker’s most beloved. Sometimes, short-form has its limits.
The Phoenician Scheme gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Del Toro’s beard and outfit in the heaven scenes is similar enough to his look from The French Dispatch that you might wonder if the two films are supposed to be connected.
I know the plot is rarely the focus in Anderson’s movies, but the epilogue here is a little confusing - did Korda’s gamble not pay off?