The Phoenician Scheme is a throwback to The Royal Tenenbaums that lacks most of its charms.
Watching The Phoenician Scheme, a globe-trotting caper about an emotionally remote business tycoon and his long-estranged daughter, I attempted a thought experiment: What if this were the first Wes Anderson movie I had ever seen, freed from any contextual knowledge of the other 12 features this sui generis auteur has turned out in the 29 years since his debut in 1996 with Bottle Rocket?
There's a tiresome if perhaps unavoidable tendency to turn every evaluation of an Anderson film into a referendum on the director's whole career. This particular oeuvre, more than that of any other filmmaker now working, seems to invite listing, ranking, and comparing. His movies exist in relation to one another like objects on a collector's shelf, there to be rearranged and reevaluated, dusted off and fussed over -- or, for the not inconsiderable contingent of filmgoers who are allergic to Anderson's signature deadpan dialogue and dollhouse-like visual design, dismissed as an undifferentiated heap of meticulously crafted but ultimately trivial toys.
For this viewer, Anderson's determination to keep leaning in to the hyperfastidious style that some argue makes his movies feel hermetically sealed off from real emotion has led, paradoxically, to an artistic breakthrough in some (not all) of his more recent work. The Grand Budapest Hotel, one of his first films to engage with a real-life historical tragedy, struck a delicate balance between antic humor and profound sorrow in its portrait of an elegant Eastern European resort on the brink of the Second World War. And though I can't say I was a fan of his most recent movie, Asteroid City, I admired how the filmmaker expanded his usual scope into a metafictional, even autobiographical space that lay far outside his usual set of concerns.
See, there I go again, comparing and contrasting, fiddling with the miniature models on my own personal shelf. Let's return to the mindset I tried to put myself in while watching The Phoenician Scheme, imagining myself as a Martian who had just been dropped, like the googly-eyed stop-motion space alien in Asteroid City, into my very first Anderson movie. It brings me no joy to report that Martian me would have felt confused, often bored, and ultimately put off by the evenly arch tone with which the film treats everything that befalls its characters, be it a joyous life experience -- falling in love, reconciling with an estranged relative -- or a painful and violent one.
There are so many examples of the latter here it's hard to narrow down, but without spoiling anything, I can at least cite the earliest such incident. In the opening scene, the private plane of the protagonist, Anatole "Zsa-zsa" Korda (Benicio del Toro), is bombed in midflight. It's the sixth assassination attempt on the notorious Korda, a proudly amoral war profiteer and ruthless capitalist whose global infrastructure empire (trains, dams, tunnels) generates revenue by any means necessary, up to and including the use of slave labor. The attack misses its target -- the indestructible Zsa-zsa will emerge from the wreckage, ready to plunder once more -- but his young assistant, strapped into a seat at the back of the plane, is blown in half. This makes for an almost Looney Tunes-style sight gag, with the unfortunate subordinate's neatly attired lower half still upright in its seat.
It's a startling image, gory and prim at the same time, and a hell of a way to kick off a movie. But the film that follows, though it purportedly tells the story of Zsa-zsa's gradual transformation into a less destructive and more humane version of himself, never wrestles with the moral dilemma that opening gag presents, not to the empathetically challenged protagonist but to us. Why did we laugh at the cartoonish demise of that nameless assistant? In the world of the movie, did his death matter? Surely we are intended to care about the fate of his replacement, a nerdy Norwegian insect specialist named Bjorn (Michael Cera), who will soon be strapped into the same plane seat. And when the tycoon receives a visit from his eldest daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), now a convent-dwelling novitiate on the verge of becoming a nun, she too is clearly intended to be someone we're invested in, what with her frosty self-possession, fierce sense of justice, and intriguing combination of white-clad piety and red-lipsticked glamour.
On the hopscotching trip these three take around the fictional nation of Phoenicia, they will meet many more oddballs, some likable and some not: Riz Ahmed as a sheltered prince, Mathieu Amalric as a fez-wearing nightclub owner, Scarlett Johansson as the wealthy second cousin to whom Zsa-zsa proposes a marriage of convenience. A series of black-and-white sequences set at the gates of heaven introduces even more famous faces in nonspeaking roles: F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray as a robe-clad, Santa-bearded God. But the uneasy question of which characters in this movie are meant to matter -- not in the abstract humanitarian sense, but as active objects of narrative interest and emotional engagement -- hovers over every scene. To give one more example: Liesl has nine younger brothers, all of them adopted, who live in a kind of dormitory in their father's lavish palazzo like so many Dickensian orphans. Though presumably all these children have had an early life at least as tragic as Liesl's -- her mother was killed in an incident she blames on her father, though he swears the murderer was his half brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) -- we never learn anything about the boys' backstory. What are their names? How old were they when Zsa-zsa adopted them, and -- a significant question given his bent for shady dealing -- what were the circumstances of those adoptions? Do the boys, too, harbor vengeance fantasies toward the cold, withholding father who, for reasons that remain unclear, has chosen to make them his barely tolerated household pets?
Del Toro's morally slippery patriarch is meant as a character in the tradition of Gene Hackman's despicable yet poignant Royal Tenenbaum: a prodigal parent whose long history of putting his needs before his children's constitutes the movie's original, but ultimately forgivable, sin. Yet through no fault of the actor who plays him, Zsa-zsa never attains such raffish heights. The script, by Anderson from a story co-written with Roman Coppola, fails to elucidate either how this man became so alienated from his own offspring or by what internal process he finds his way back. We know he will eventually reconcile with his daughter because that is established early on as the character's necessary moral arc, but their rapprochement remains a script contrivance rather than a tangible human connection. Threapleton's performance as the morally outraged novitiate is tartly amusing -- though Threapleton is Kate Winslet's daughter, she is no nepo baby -- but the screenplay holds her pain and anger with her father at such a distance that I could never manage to care about either character. For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.
The standout in the huge cast (and I haven't even mentioned the brief appearances of Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, or Charlotte Gainsbourg) is Cera as the Norwegian insect enthusiast with a secret or two up his well-tailored sleeve. Cera's low-key delivery is perfectly suited to Anderson's rat-a-tat non sequiturs -- it's surprising that an actor so well matched to this director's style has never worked with him before, and it's to be hoped he will do so again. Though this may be my least favorite Anderson movie to date, somewhere down there with The Darjeeling Limited (damn, there I go, ranking again!), I remain as curious as ever to see what this always imaginative, invariably obsessive, and intermittently brilliant filmmaker gets up to with his next scheme.