You Know What This Is
Wes Anderson’s latest construction offers zero surprises.
The Phoenician Scheme
Director: Wes Anderson • Writer: Wes Anderson
Starring: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson
USA • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong May 29 • I
Grade: C
There are plenty of filmmakers whose work you can look at and identify immediately. Early on John Woo’s doves gave him away every time, never mind the gunplay that everyone else started copying in the 1990s. There’s a zoom-y, fractured quality to Michael Bay’s hallmark “Bayhem” that sets him apart. We use the phrase “Hitchcockian” for a reason, Yorgos Lanthimos’s stilted drama is unmistakable, if there’s a New York gangster around it’s probably Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard will forever be associated with the jump cut. But then there’s Wes Anderson, who takes aesthetic signatures to a whole new level. It’s auteurism on steroids. His manicured dialogue and the aggressive artifice of his spaces – something that really seemed to entrench itself after Moonrise Kingdom – makes Anderson an all-or-nothing proposition; you love his work or you hate it. Full disclosure, I tend to hate it.
If you don’t, then ga yauh. I’ll admit The Phoenician Scheme is a step up from Asteroid City and yonks ahead of the insufferable The French Dispatch, which said nothing and went nowhere. Maybe it’s because Benicio del Toro brings a new energy to the typcial Anderson Man and the good will generated by Anderson throwing serious shade at the Fanta Fascist at Cannes is lingering. But even those delights can’t paper over the fact that Anderson is running on the spot. Writing what you know is one thing but even Bay (Pain and Gain), Hitchcock (Rope) and Scorsese (The Age of Innocence) have felt compelled to try something new every so often. You can love him all you want but that doesn’t change the fact that Anderson hasn’t progressed as an artist in over a decade.
New DOP, same look
The primary Anderson Man this time around is Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (del Toro, totally game), a 1950s industrialist and weapons dealer – we call them oligarchs now – who survives the latest of multiple assassination attempts on a private Korda Air flight. He’s one of the most despised people in the world and he knows it, so feeling the walls closing in Korda summons his long lost daughter Liesl (Kate Winslet’s progeny, Mia Threapleton), now studying to be a nun. He informs her that she’s now heir to his vast fortune despite him having nine sons. Initially she bristles at leaving the order but eventually agrees, seeing it as a way to fund “good works”. For reasons, entomologist Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera, and it’s hard to believe this twee MF hasn’t done an Anderson film already) is hanging around Korda’s palazzo to teach everyone about bugs – and becomes Korda’s business administrator. So armed with his new manager and assisstant, he goes looking for more money from his investors in order to thwart the shady regulators or business cabal (?) led by Excaliber (Rupert Friend). The cabal is manipulating stock markets for personal gain price fixing to throw Korda’s plans for Phoenicia (not the area that’s now Lebanon?) off track. That money will come from Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), Leland and Reagan (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), wheeler-dealer Marty (Jeffrey Wright), Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) and finally, hopefully, the contrarian Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Along the way Liesl tries to suss out who her father really is, and if Korda killed her mother as rumours suggest.
The Phoenician Scheme isn’t without its peculiar charms. There’s a running hand grenade gag that’s legit funny (“Grenade?” “That’s very kind of you”) and more violence than Anderson has ever depicted before. My bad. He has progressed. Marginally – because first time Anderson cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth) shooting on 35mm film, has zero trouble getting down with the Anderson vibe, no doubt helped by regular production designer Adam Stockhausen (an Oscar winner for The Grand Budapest Hotel). Phoenician is a little cleaner, a little leaner, but it’s still Stockhausen manifesting Anderson’s bleached, mid-century diorama dollhouse visuals. The cast is topped up by F Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Charlotte Gainsbourg and a way underused Richard Ayoade as radical freedom fighter Sergio. And he had the audacity to cast Bill Murray as God, ’cause what’s Anderson without Murray?
The heightened action (that final fight with Nubar is… a thing) and simmering commentary on outsized wealth, those who horde it and deploy it only to gain more wealth, and the misguided equation of wealth with fulfilment works thanks mostly to del Toro’s wounded, hangdog physicality and modulated vocals in his rat-a-tat debates with the principled Liesl. The picaresque, road trip structure of the story wastes the typically high-powered cast – everyone gets their seven to 10 minutes – though Cranston and a hilariously hep cat turn by Wright stand out. Another running gag about “actually paying the slave labour” is incredibly on the nose but hey. Sometimes on the nose works. And packaging aside, Anderson’s at least pushing back on the billionaire myth cult. Ballsy considering Anderson’s patron is one.