It’s hard to pinpoint when Wes Anderson The Brand caught up with Wes Anderson The Director. It might have been some time around his spot for American Express — and certainly before he started shilling luxury fountain pens — but Anderson’s textbook twee has positioned him as the rare modern director instantly identifiable by the general public, an aesthetic lodestar for everything from dusty Tumblr blogs to corporate branding decks. That notoriety is enough to get to one’s head, and with 2023’s Asteroid City, Wes took the chance to clear the air. The movie is as close to an explicit artist’s statement as we’ve gotten from Anderson, a metatextual tour de force that doubles as a defiant defense of his space on the shelf of cinematic shorthand. Asteroid City quickly settled as a fan favorite, leaving his scores of tote-bearing devotees hungry to learn what comes after a career retrospective.
The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s first feature since Asteroid City, offers a surprising answer: darkness. The movie concerns Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), an old-money magnate whose crooked capitalism has spurned enough enemies to keep him narrowly dodging assassination attempts across Phoenician’s 100-odd minutes. It opens with the bloodiest set piece of Anderson’s career, and a battered Zsa-Zsa knows he can’t keep dodging the flaming arrows, dynamite, and poisoned drinks sent his way forever. He’s bent on ensuring a cent of his fortune doesn’t reach his nemeses’ hands once he’s finally done in, and decides that his inheritance is best left to Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a daughter he’d shipped off to a convent who’s since devoted her life to Christ. Death is knocking, and only bitterness is keeping it at bay.
Bitterness, yes, but not enough to dull the spirit. Zsa-Zsa’s many near-death episodes are punctuated by black-and-white, star-studded visions of the beyond. The Phoenician Scheme trades Wes’s traditional pastels for a palette of brutalist gray and beige, and these heavenly segments find the director at his most austere. Zsa-Zsa awakens in front of a panel of grim judges (Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, and Charlotte Gainsbourg among them), children dormant in coffins, and, at one point, God himself (Bill Murray). Faith is relatively untrodden territory for Anderson, and while the vignettes never miss the chance for a punchline, they point toward a troubled agnosticism divorced from the director’s typical buoyancy. They’re chilly matchbox approximations of Bergman and Tarkovsky, less come-to-Jesus epiphanies that right Zsa-Zsa’s path than jolts that scare up enough curiosity to draw him closer to his daughter.
With Liesl at his side, Zsa-Zsa cooks up a scheme convoluted enough to match the Fabergé intricacy of Anderson’s brand-famous storyboards. Over a globe-trotting trek pockmarked by blood-lusting avengers, the estranged father and daughter set out to renegotiate investments behind a power plant from five financiers whose patience with Zsa-Zsa is as strained as the corners of the Korda’s map. How, exactly, these readjusted terms might ultimately benefit Zsa-Zsa is a secret kept close to his breast, and that tangled strategy bleeds into The Phoenician Scheme’s plot to open the movie’s biggest vulnerabilities. Following Zsa-Zsa’s logic is exhausting even by Wes’s standards. For Anderson detractors, tolerance for error comes at a lofty premium, and the turns Phoenician insists upon taking can at times dare viewers to dismiss it as among his lesser works.
Fortunately, Anderson’s muscled quirk arms the nature of Phoenician’s business chats with enough thrill and levity to salvage what might have been damaged by their density — at times, it even winks at its own complications. Zsa-Zsa and Liesl win contracts over gunfights, robberies, pickup basketball games, and blood transfusions, each labored victory drawing the father and daughter a bit closer. And that’s critical: the bond between Zsa-Zsa and Liesl proves to be The Phoenician Scheme’s ace in the hole, a highlight in a filmography spent hunched over the fallout of overbearing patriarchs. Liesl’s piety is studied and challenged, every bit as compelling as her father’s grandiosity, and the warming effect she imposes on the staunch tycoon finds a mirror in the traces of Zsa-Zsa’s materialism that betray her devotion. It’s no small provocation to endear an audience to a violent capitalist and an uncompromising Catholic amid the detritus of Trump’s America, but The Phoenician Scheme is absent the sort of droll parallelism that may have rendered it a groaning parable (see Mark Ruffalo’s Trump surrogate in Mickey 17). Here, faith and capitalism loom as severe and benign as a monolith, daring man to scale their marble surface.
Wes Anderson is perhaps the most accomplished wrangler of A-listers since Robert Altman, and there’s no shortage of talent gunning for The Phoenician Scheme’s MVP title. Zsa-Zsa and Liesl are tagged on their journeys by Bjørn, a Norwegian entomologist played by Michael Cera, whose Guaraldian tics and sloped shoulders fit snugly in Anderson’s playbook. Jeffery Wright and Richard Ayoade, meanwhile, both earn notches in their scene-stealing victory belts. Anderson’s regulars, old and new — from Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe to Riz Ahmed and Rupert Friend — round out a cast so formidable it could double as a late-night panel once everyone’s out of costume. A lazier hand may have pressed the lever to double down on the call sheet’s walk of fame; Anderson manages to keep his stars separate from any sense of gimmick in favor of the dioramic chapter-book fantasies he executes at his best.
That ensemble cast is another mea culpa for The Phoenician Scheme’s admitted snarls. There are plenty of cameos, drop-ins, and one-liners to save the movie from its own dead ends, and when those don’t prove enough, it always finds its way back to Zsa-Zsa and Liesl. The gulf between this father and daughter is as deep and troubled as that between money and God; The Phoenician Scheme finds the freedom to sink between those two poles and watch the waves crash overhead. For a director so often pinned to an algorithmically replicable toolbox (fairly or otherwise), it’s a refreshing — and at times astounding — taste of nuance.
DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson; CAST: Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: May 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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