After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it disappears, it reads “Oh, did another Wes Anderson film premiere to a muted response at Cannes only to turn out to be another masterpiece? I guess it’s summer again.” I mentioned last year in discussions around Asteroid City that I think Anderson is a filmmaker that we have started to take for granted, even if I personally didn’t care much for The French Dispatch (which Brandon reviewed very positively here). There was much consternation about Asteroid City among some of the people that I ran into at a Friendsgiving in November, and I mostly kept my opinion to myself. It’s a movie that requires you to get on its level and is the only one of his films that I would describe as genuinely surreal. If you didn’t like or get it, then I don’t know that I really have the language to articulate what about it spoke so clearly and effectively to me, or that “getting it” would automatically translate to “liking it.” What I will say is that Asteroid City is far from being an entry level Anderson film, or one with broad general appeal, and that The French Dispatch is also not one that I think should be anyone’s first. The Phoenician Scheme, however, with its mostly straightforward narrative structure, is one that I think will be of interest to a larger audience and range of viewers. 

Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is an international arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself surviving the most recent of numerous attempts on his life when his plane goes down in 1950. Unlike in his previous miraculous survivals, any of which may have taken the lives of his three dead wives, this time he undergoes a near death experience in which he faces divine judgment regarding his heavenly worthiness. Somewhat shaken by this, Korda reaches out to the eldest of his ten children and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), who is a novice preparing to take her final vows to become a nun. Although it’s been years, he offers to provisionally make her the heir to his empire, which would be flattering if all of her brothers weren’t children aged three to fifteen (Korda has adopted several in addition to his biological sons, in case all of his genetic progeny turn out to be duds). Further complicating matters is the widespread belief that Liesl’s mother, Korda’s first wife, was killed at his hands, and although he vehemently denies that he has ever directly or indirectly committed murder, his ongoing recognition of a large number of assassins whom he previously employed calls his veracity into question. Not to mention that he is completely unencumbered by any apparent ethical limitations, as his most recent and greatest work, an infrastructural overhaul of the fictional nation of Phoenicia, will require the use of slave labor, and that he claims responsibility for a famine in the area that’s destabilized local power structures in order for him to have his way. Although Liesl’s devotion to her faith calls her to return and take her vows, her own morals demand that she take the opportunity to agree to Korda’s offer on the condition that there are no more famines or slaves (and that her brothers are moved from a dormitory across the street into Korda’s gigantic mansion, and that some level of paternal attentiveness is provided for them).

For all his many, many flaws as a father and a human being, Korda has an endless thirst for knowledge, which includes the hiring of numerous tutors on various subjects to provide extemporaneous lectures to the boys and himself. The most recent of these is Norwegian entomology professor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), who ends up along for the ride serving as Korda’s new administrative secretary (the last one died in the plane crash that opened the film). Korda lays out the movie’s overarching plot quickly and in detail. Due to actions on the part of Korda’s industrial enemies, market manipulation of the cost of “bashable rivets” has suddenly created a funding gap for the whole titular scheme, so he must convince all of the other investors in his project to cover some percentage of “The Gap.” These include Phoenicia’s crown prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the brother duo of venture capitalists Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Korda’s second cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), Casablanca-inspired nightclub owner and gangster Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and “Uncle” Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s estranged half-brother. As Korda meets with each of them in turn, he finds himself returning to Heaven’s courtroom, where he is defended by an attorney named Knave (Willem Dafoe) before God (Bill Murray) and interacts with Liesl’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in her afterlife. Under the guidance of Liesl’s moral certitude and with things not going well for him “upstairs,” Korda grows as a person despite never losing his sardonic edge. 

The set pieces that comprise this one are all a lot of fun. When I was telling a friend about it, the one with whom I had watched so many Final Destination films, I noted that this movie opened almost like one of those would, with an airplane blowing out part of its fuselage and a man being ripped in half as a result, except that it’s done in a typically Andersonian visual style, with string and stop motion bits in place of fire and guts, and it sets a great tone for what is to follow. Even while using his standard palette, Anderson is doing a few new things, including using a very shallow depth of field in several wide shots of the massive room in which Korda reunites with his daughter, which causes the image to appear diorama-like until people enter and the illusory spell is broken. It’s fun stuff, and calls to mind the experimental playfulness on display in, for instance, the tour of the submarine in The Life Aquatic. The aforementioned surreality of Asteroid City is not completely absent here, although it’s limited to the scenes in which Korda finds himself at his out of body inquest and its various asides, and they’re very funny; there’s something a bit Mel Brooks about the whole celestial spectacle, which I mean as a great compliment. They’re also much more palatable, as I can imagine the average moviegoer—a “normie” for lack of a better term—showing up to Asteroid City and being completely put off by some of the more esoteric choices, especially with regards to the “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” refrain that occurs near the film’s ending. Here, confining the more dreamlike elements of the piece to these near-death visions posits them in a rhetorical space that demands less suspension of disbelief (and which contains, perhaps, less whimsy) and is likely going to be more acceptable to the standard viewer. As such, The Phoenician Scheme could easily function as a very good introduction to Anderson’s body of work, since it’s much more straightforward approach would have a broader appeal. 

Del Toro is excellent in this, giving a truly outstanding performance. Korda is a bit of an Andersonian archetype in that his treatment of his children is absurd in the way it finds comedy in its outlandish neglectfulness. This, along with his desire for familial reconciliation, makes him a figure very much like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, but with a bit of a twist. Whereas Royal had a desire to reconnect with his family that was almost entirely selfish and self-interested and he was willing to fake having a terminal illness to get in close, Korda is the ultimate capitalist robber baron who seems to have never cared about anyone other than himself (and perhaps Liesl’s late mother) but who has a large, unloved family that he has no real desire to connect to (like certain other billionaires we could name). He seems more interested in having a family because he’s expected to have some kind of legacy, even if he hadn’t given much thought to what that could mean until he survives his seventh plane crash. There’s a great scene in the “Marseille Bob” segment of the film in which said gangster’s night club is invaded by socialist revolutionaries led by Richard Ayoade, and Korda gets into the middle of things and ends up shot by a trigger-happy rebel. Bob mistakes this accident as a sign of Korda’s nobility and immediately agrees to cover a part of The Gap, and although Korda clearly takes advantage of this error, Del Toro plays the moment as if the motor-mouthed cad is slightly taken aback at how good it feels for someone to believe you’re capable of change. There’s a talent to adding that kind of nuance in both performance and direction without skipping a beat in the dizzyingly-fast dialogue. 

As a counterpoint to all of this, we see Liesl slowly let go of the trappings of faith while retaining her sense of self (there’s a great bit where she admits she’s never heard God’s voice but that she imagines that she does, and He just tells her to do what she was going to do anyway). First, as a rider to her accepting provisional heirship, Korda has her give up her humble rosary for a “secular” one, which is gaudy and covered in jewels. Later, she is given a more ornate replacement for her corncob pipe, which is even tackier. When she tries to return to her order, the Mother Superior tells her that these worldly possessions (which she did not seek but merely received) indicate that she is among those who are simply not cut out for a life of cloistered humility spent in prayer. Part of the film’s genuine heart is finding out where Liesl and her father are going to meet in the middle, and the film is filled with objective correlative metaphors for this in the number of images of things which don’t quite connect, most notably a railway gap of about twenty feet that ends up becoming a makeshift basketball court (it makes sense in context). 

Where the film fumbled somewhat was with the Uncle Nubar character. Cumberbatch is done up in intentionally ridiculous facial hair, and he looks a bit like Ming the Merciless if he stopped grooming or conditioning his mustache and beard and let the whole situation get a little scraggly. It’s a little much, and Cumberbatch’s performance is at first a hard pill to swallow, but by the time he and Korda get into a knock-down drag-out fight, I had come around on it. Some people in my screening were enjoying it from the start, and what I noticed at this movie (which was actually the same theater in which I saw Asteroid City last year) was that it shared that film’s propensity to elicit laughs from different parts of the audience at different times. The jokes come at such a rapid pace that sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the music of the dialogue, and the guy six seats over is laughing at something that you’ve missed and the couple behind you are getting a lot more out of Cumberbatch than you are while you’re laughing at something that it seems like only one other person enjoyed. In my screening, there was one man one row in front of me and two seats over who fell asleep almost immediately and then snored for the remaining 90 minutes. A comedy that’s able to be funny to different people in different ways (and a great movie to take a nap to for that guy in Row C) is laudable, and isn’t to be taken for granted. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond