The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson’s latest movie, which opens Thursday in theaters all over Israel, has every quirk and flourish that his fans have come to expect and that his detractors find annoying: meticulous production design, a star-studded cast featuring many of his regulars, plus a couple of newcomers, who speak in monotones; symmetrical shots; planimetric staging (actors in front of flat backgrounds, which makes sets resemble a stage); incredibly detailed models for backgrounds rather than green screens or location shooting; precocious, adorable children; a stylized color palette in color scenes, interspersed with black and white sections; a dysfunctional family at the center of the story; and a chapter structure, complete with title cards.
But it doesn’t include a compelling, comprehensible storyline, or characters you care about. I can remember dozens of details of specific shots, but I also recall wishing frequently that it would end already, and it’s only 101 minutes long.
It’s a comedy/espionage thriller, focused on a single family, and that makes it marginally more entertaining than his previous film, Asteroid City, which featured a sprawling storyline about a space exploration convention for teens in the desert in the 1950s, interspersed with black-and-white shots of a teleplay about the desert story being directed and acted for a prestige television broadcast. It made me feel like I was being tested on my knowledge of 1950s pop culture and arcane trivia about the Actor’s Studio and Playhouse 90, but it didn’t elicit any other response.
Movie plot
A plot summary for The Phoenician Scheme will likely make it seem more entertaining than it is, but it starts out strong, with the latest assassination attempt on arms dealer and industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro) in 1950, while he is aboard a private plane. This excitingly photographed, fast-paced sequence turned out to be the highlight of the movie. Korda has amassed a fortune through making unscrupulous deals, and he has many enemies. He may be meant to conjure thoughts of prominent businessmen today, but it’s all too whimsical and elaborate for any real political commentary to come through.
While he is unconscious following the attempt on his life, he enters a black-and-white afterlife, where a tribunal judges his fitness to enter Heaven. Bill Murray, an Anderson fixture, plays God, but oddly doesn’t get any good lines.
When Korda awakens, he realizes that the assassins will catch up to him sooner or later and resolves to mend fences with his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), a Catholic novice whom he placed in a convent when she was a child. She, and everyone else, suspects that he murdered her mother. He chooses her to inherit his fortune, leaving out her nine brothers.
Liesl barely shows any emotion as she abandons the convent and sets off with her father in his peripatetic existence, accompanied by Korda’s tutor, Norwegian entomologist Bjorg (Michael Cera, with an unclassifiable accent and a big mustache). While various governments are cracking down on Korda’s unethical tactics, he finds an opportunity that he wants to pursue, the titular scheme, which involves using slave labor to turn a profit in a mythical Levantine country, ruled by Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed).
Korda spans the globe, finding investors to cheat. These include two Californians named Leland and Reagan (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a French Algerian night-club owner (Mathieu Amalric), and Marty (Jeffrey Wright) from Newark. Along the way, he meets up with his estranged half-brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), a vaguely Teutonic cousin (Scarlett Johansson), and another dozen characters, most of whom get a scene or two. There’s a subplot involving terrorists who look like European university students, and one of the main characters turns out to be a US government spy.
Anderson's references
As with most of his recent movies, I spent much of the running time figuring out what Anderson was referencing in each scene. For what it’s worth, I thought that it might be an attempt to recreate movies produced by Hungarian émigré to Britain, Alexander Korda – since that is the main character’s name – who produced various dramas and adventure films.
The afterlife tribunal seems to reference the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie, A Matter of Life and Death. Korda produced some of Powell and Pressburger’s movies, although not this one. I could come up with more suggestions, but in the end, it’s a game that proves that I had no real interest in the actual story.
Anderson collaborated on the screenplay with Roman Coppola, the younger son of Francis Ford Coppola, as he has for most of the movies he has made in the past two decades. The three Anderson movies that had the most impact on me, where the characters were both archetypes but also emotionally resonant, were his first three: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which were all co-written by actor Owen Wilson.
I get the impression that Wilson is more emotional than Anderson, and that he helped keep the focus clearly on the characters rather than the production design and allusions. Every time I go to an Anderson movie, I hope for the magic of the first three – and time and again I’ve been disappointed, as I was with The Phoenician Scheme.
The movie is dedicated to Fouad Mikhael Maalouf, a Lebanese businessman who was Anderson’s late father-in-law. He has described Maalouf as intimidating and fascinating and he apparently inspired the Korda character. The movie clearly means something personal to Anderson, more so than most of his movies, perhaps. It’s too bad it won’t mean much to audiences.