With this, Wes Anderson’s 12th feature, and setting aside the shorts package he did for Netflix in 2023, it scarcely benefits anyone to enumerate the familiar design details of a Wes Anderson movie. If this is, perchance, your first Wes Anderson movie, see one other one and you will know exactly what we’re talking about. The real question at this point is: Is The Phoenician Scheme a good version of a Wes Anderson movie, or a bad one?
For Anderson diehards, there is no bad version. For the rest of us, the fussy ticks and neatly composed shots that we said we would not enumerate do sometimes grate on us. However, the rest of us probably cannot agree on which ones tickle us and which ones grate on us.
With the stipulation that this is, indeed, a subjective assessment, The Phoenician Scheme seems to land a middle ground where it isn’t likely to strike anyone as a major work, but it also isn’t likely to really piss anyone off.
Anderson perennially revisits the same aesthetic but usually not the same genre. The hint of a new one is evident in the very first scene, with a surprise moment of violence that it’s best not to spoil beyond saying there’s a surprise moment of violence. We think we might be in a spy movie, though that’s not to say there have never been spies in Wes Anderson movies. There certainly have been.
The scheme in question has something to do with a large infrastructure project in the fictitious country of Phoenicia that a billionaire industrialist type, Zsz Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), intends to fund, if he can get enough money to cover the gap between his own resources and the actual project cost, if he isn’t assassinated first. His opening plane crash is the sixth such he’s survived, in addition to dozens of other flirtations with death he shouldn’t have walked away from. He’s now taking precautions by making his lone daughter (among nine sons) the sole executor and beneficiary of his state, even though Liesel (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter) is about to take her vows as a nun.
If the project’s going to go forward, Zsa Zsa needs to get investments from a half dozen business associates roughly equivalent in resources to himself, one of whom is his own step brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), who may have killed one of his three deceased wives. He’s got his concept for the project housed in a variety of decorative shoe boxes, which play as chapters of the film.
It’s these shoe boxes that signify the Anderson aesthetic as much anything, though really, everything in the film accomplishes that goal. As you might expect, The Phoenician Scheme is wall-to-wall with beautiful mid-century design details (the film takes place in 1950, at exactly mid century), from the rich browns and oranges of the upholstery of a private jet, to the marvelous gray and white tiled floor of his bathroom, into which the opening titles blend as Anderson captures the scene in slow motion from above. If you are looking for touches that may be new to Anderson, he’s never used much slow mo outside of the regrettable final scene of The Darjeeling Limited.
If you’re looking for memorable uses of Anderson’s trademark ensemble casts, you may be a bit more out of luck. Although these faces do show up – even in a recurring black-and-white afterlife sequence in which they play various gods sitting around marble temples – few of them have the opportunity to really make an impression. As just one example, Bill Murray appears here with a large bushy beard for about 45 seconds, which maybe is all Anderson was willing to allocate him after Murray was semi-cancelled and excluded from participation in Asteroid City. (Notably, though, he’s listed as God in the credits here.)
No, this film relies more heavily on the few previously mentioned leads, as well as Michael Cera in the humorous role of Zsa Zsa’s new tutor in entomology, who has an unplaceable Eastern European accent that is never not funny. They’re all capable and they all do the Anderson style well, all being veterans of his previous films, though the faces that pop up and leave too quickly do function as something of a tease.
There are a lot of hearty chuckles here, though, from moments of absurdity we did not quite expect, or from line deliveries that are just so. Laughter is the great tiebreaker with Anderson, because it means you’re either picking up what he’s putting down or you’re not. Because it would be cruel not to give you an example, consider the scene where Zsa Zsa is hashing out a contract whose details he has manipulated with a couple of tycoons played by Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks. Whether they sign or not is predicated on the outcome of a game of the basketball shooting game H-O-R-S-E, involving a basketball net unfolded from the side of their locomotive, and featuring a partner for Zsa Zsa in the form of a prince played by Riz Ahmed, who has never held a basketball in his life.
It’s not worth giving you any more than that taste, because for the most part, The Phoenician Scheme tastes good and is worth discovering on your own. However, it does lack the undercurrent of light but potent sentiment that is the secret weapon in Anderson’s bigger successes, which is what leaves this film with its sense of disposability within Anderson’s filmography. Of course, disposable Anderson is still better than most of what’s available in cinemas these days.
The Phoenician Scheme is currently playing in cinemas.