VERDICT: A Wes Anderson with all of the typefaces and upholsteries you’d expect, but none of the heart or soul of his best films.
To illustrate the titular plans in The Phoenician Scheme, a character unveils an elaborate diorama that proceeds to malfunction and implode. Writer-director Wes Anderson is smart enough to know he’s provided his critics with a juicy metaphor, so rather than walk into his trap, I will avoid it like an Anderson character, whipping my head around 90 degrees while the camera pans sideways to something else.
Still, that collapsing object of beauty sticks in the mind, since The Phoenician Scheme sees Anderson indulging in all of his usual design fetishes (we don’t just get precisely-lettered labels on ornate boxes, we also get the yellowing cellophane tape affixed to those labels) without seeming to get around to a story or characters or themes.
Some Wes Anderson movies address loneliness and love and ambition and regret; this one communicates the filmmaker’s sadness that he never got to travel First Class on the Orient Express in 1932, or on a TWA intercontinental flight in 1962. Fine experiences to long for, to be sure, but perhaps more suited to one of the American Express ads he made several years ago rather than, say, an entire feature-length film.
Benecio Del Toro stars as Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, an international financier whose schemes make him the perpetual target of assassination attempts. Facing his mortality, he decides to pluck his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton, The Buccaneers) out of a convent to make her the heir of his business empire. His current obsession involves closing “the gap” on his latest scheme, which means going to visit various business partners to try to get them to increase their stake.
Those partners include a pair of Sacramento-based brothers (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a Middle Eastern prince (Riz Ahmed), a French nightclub owner (Mathieu Amalric), and Zsa-Zsa’s nefarious half-brother (Benedict Cumberbatch). Along for the ride is tutor and entomologist Bjorn (Michael Cera), with occasional surprise appearances by Richard Ayoade as a leader of a Communist insurgency cell.
Whether he’s gaining or losing money, or having black-and-white visions of his judgment in the afterlife, Zsa-Zsa never emerges as much of a character, despite Anderson’s intent to craft him as Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin via Aristotle Onassis.
And while the talented ensemble finds the individual moments of deadpan comedy throughout — Anderson is, after all, the heir to Godard and Hal Hartley when it comes to mining monotonal delivery for laughs — The Phoenician Scheme is a gorgeous object that doesn’t seem to have much to express about it characters or life as anyone knows it.
At his most fully successful, Anderson seamlessly incorporates human reality into his maximalist production. His characters don’t always break through to epiphanies, but they try to locate their souls simultaneously. Yet in films like this one and earlier efforts such as The French Dispatch, the qualitative needs of his characters are subsumed under the weight of visual artifice and mechanical processes. His crowded frame, unregulated, pushes the concerns of actual people to the side.
As always, the craft here is exceedingly on point, almost to an excess. It’s easy to get lost in the labels and logos and curtains and classic works of art (from Renoir and Magritte, among others) since they’re all far more interesting than what’s being said or done. One almost wishes that Anderson had skipped the movie and gone straight for the coffee-table book, which would no doubt be exquisite.
