The Phoenician Scheme (2025 | USA | 105 minutes | Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson movies are a genre unto themselves, often misunderstood as shallow, whimsical dioramas. That some fail to see the immense emotion beneath the ornately hand-crafted surfaces and trademark camera positioning and movement remains a matter of great mystery to those of us who eagerly watch and rewatch each film and revisit the old ones to find new depths. His latest, The Phoenician Scheme, is unlikely to change that perception, but to me it’s another unqualified success: genuinely funny, occasionally moving, and more timely than expected.
Once again, Anderson populates his latest film with a sprawling cast of all-stars. However, where his recent oeuvre has been ensemble-driven, fragmented narratives, with The Phoenician Scheme (co-written with Roman Coppola) he returns to a (more or less) straightforward quest comedy with a duo (or maybe a trio) at its core. Anderson frequently returns to the topic of troubled parent-child relationships, and this one is no exception. However, isolated industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is far and away the least lovable of the many scoundrels who inhabit his panoply of Bad Dads. We meet him in the midst of an in-flight bombing that takes down his private plane, explodes his traveling secretary into bloody pieces, and leaves him face-down in a cornfield with a vestigial organ dangling outside of his body.
As we watch his recovery from above, he’s a man alone in a milky white bathtub attended to by an elegant choreography of nurses and maids. Complementing the Stravinsky, Alexandre Desplat’s near-elegiac minor key score denies the sense of levity that typically underlies these affairs. Capers may be afoot, but don’t expect any signature needle drops to do any emotional heavy lifting amid the deadpan dialogue. Similarly, the candy-colored production design that we’ve come to expect from Anderson’s jewel box production is far more muted. Where other Andersonian settings are cluttered with meaningful objects of sentimental value, Zsa-Zsa’s home base is a centuries-old palazzo with a muted color palette of whites, grays, and cool tones. Sure, the antihero at the center of this story has only [actual] masterpieces on the walls, but the cavernous rooms are under-furnished, sparsely decorated, damp and drafty, and in a state of encroaching disrepair.
Benicio del Toro, having anchored a leg of The French Dispatch as a jailhouse artist, gets the starring role here. He plays Zsa-Zsa, a flatly-accented man without a country, more likely to be ruffled by a business disagreement than an attempt on his life. A venal, universally-despised tycoon who’s built an empire of lies on last-minute deals sneakily renegotiated in his favor, running a collection of schemes whose shortfalls are covered by swindling other investors and whose slave labor workers emerge from famines he’s created. Less obviously loathsome than any real-world modern-day counterparts, similarities to whom are surely coincidental, del Toro necessarily brings only deeply muted charisma to the role of a menacing man whose personal ethos is to smash anything or anyone who gets in his way.
Despite skating along through many crises, even his luck is wearing thin. We’re following a man who’s faced enough assassination attempts, recently coupled with near-death experiences, that he’s grudgingly come to realize he can’t escape forever. One could call him paranoid for carrying a portable lie detector and testing all of his food for poison if they didn’t so frequently reveal lies and attempts to kill him. In addition to the bodily damage, this most recent assassination attempt has given the lifelong atheist a glimpse of a heavenly afterlife — shot as crisp black and white interstitials with plenty of great cameos — that until now he has refused to believe could exist.
Faced with his own mortality, Zsa-Zsa is so untrusting and untrustworthy that he’s seemingly the singular strongman figure of his sprawling operations. His most recent traveling secretary was exploded to bloody pieces in an airplane bombing. We find him late in life with no other colleagues, mentees, or corporate hierarchies to assume the mantle should he become incapacitated. Although he has nine young sons, biological and adopted — the better to play the odds — it’s his eldest daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who he summons to his side after the most recent plane crash. Threapleton may look uncannily familiar (she’s Kate Winslet’s daughter and bears more than a passing resemblance that causes everyone she meets to comment on how stunning she is), but this is her first film role. Playing the perfectly-coiffed Liesl, whose affectations include a rosary and corncob pipe, she inhabits the pristine white robe and veil with a sort of self-assuredness that reflects an abandoned rich girl whose life has been in the service of certainty. She’s a capable foil for del Toro’s towering Zsa-Zsa.
It’s not so much the idea that his vast business empire might not survive him that irks Zsa-Zsa or that he could end his life estranged from his daughter. Instead, it’s the fear that someone else could profit from it in perpetuity, rather than any sort of paternal regret that motivates him to summon Liesl, from her convent a mere month before she was set to takes her vows. Their reunion, six years since last contact (not that anyone’s been keeping track), is a chilly affair. He presents his daughter, robed in white novitiate garb and veil, with a contract to become the sole heir and proprietor of his business in the event of his actual demise. Having come to visit him only to confront him over the murder of her mother that she (and everyone else) assumes he committed, she’s decidedly skeptical of the proposition. However, each for their own reasons, they agree to a trial period.
The contract signed, Zsa-Zsa outlines his life’s work — the titular “scheme” — as organized in a series of shoeboxes. The arrows fired by her much-younger half-brothers from above serve as a portent of troubles that lie ahead. Namely, his many squabbling enemies abroad have set aside their quibbles with each other, united in hatred for him and his unsavory business dealings, and joined forces to manipulate the market to drive up his costs and ruin him and his already shaky infrastructure campaign.
As the tickertape warns him that his funding gaps have become cavernous, Zsa-Zsa gathers Liesl and appoints his recently hired entomology tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera) to act as his personal secretary as they race around Greater Phoenicia (a proxy for a much-plundered post-WWII Middle East) with a bag full of money and a box full of hand grenades to meet with investors and salvage the project. Cera seems so naturally Andersonian that it’s a shock that Bjorn is his first role with the director. Whether it’s delivering absurd facts about insects, longingly questioning the possibility of Liesl’s affections, or extolling the pleasures of an ice-cold beer, the lines he delivers in a Scandinavian accent of inventive rhythms and diction carry the film’s most frequent laughs.
As they make their way around the region to meet with his partners for allegedly ceremonial signings of previously agreed upon contracts (that Zsa-Zsa has covertly if hamhandedly rejiggered to cover “the gap”), we’re introduced to the rest of the sprawling ensemble. Riz Ahmed plays a dashing prince who partners in a project to cut a railroad tunnel through the desert. It’s there that a pair of investors played by Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston arrive by rail for a hilarious basketball bluster. At the next Casablanca-inspired stop, Mathieu Amalric is a Fez-sporting proprietor of an ornate nightclub who’s enraged equally by Zsa-Zsa’s duplicity as by the destruction incurred by a band of socialist jungle terrorists led by Richard Ayoade. They escape to borrow blood and money from a hepcat sea captain played by Jeffrey Wright, before proposing a marriage scheme to a utopian cousin played by Scarlett Johansson. Along the way, there are revelations about identities, more near-death experiences that find Zsa-Zsa realizing that his immortal soul is on trial, and a series of updated figures tracking percentages of debt that’s been covered.
Despite all the moving pieces, Anderson ably steers the action as it moves zippily along to a final setpiece featuring one of his best scale models and a confrontation with a half-brother, possible-father, maybe-criminal adversary played by Benedict Cumberbatch, dressed in a poorly-fitting suit and a ridiculous beard. Before we get there, we learn a bit about each of our trio’s pasts — a lot of neglect, generational trauma, and a reminder of how hurt people hurt people. There’s some negotiating for souls, revelations quiet and loud of fakery, and an investigation of the quiet simple evil that drives so much evil in this world: finding out who can lick who (or rather, whom). It is not exactly cutting political commentary, but even set in an imaginary place in a long-ago time, it has echoes in present day late stage capitalist corruption and decline.
Because he has made his entire career of these visual feasts of droll comedy, some too easily dismiss Wes Anderson’s worlds of intricate production design as precious affectations. In a world of increasingly lazy AI and computer graphics, the hand-crafted marvels that fill every corner of the frame are something to celebrate. Be it a gem-encrusted “secular rosary”, an ostentatious bejeweled corncob pipe, or a library of sight-gag books, these films are made from real objects, each made by an actual human craftsperson for a perfectionist visual stylist to telling this particular story. It’s a miracle of that he can continue to make these richly-appointed character studies, with every filigreed ornamentation serving a purpose.
Of course, they’re a visual delight, but there’s more to it. Zsa-Zsa is never portrayed as anything other than a ruthless capitalist, consumed by greed at the expense of others. Even as we come to know how paternal neglect sharpened his own outsized ambitions and dulled his capacity for empathy, it’s never a sympathetic portrait. There’s an alchemy in the dry humor, intricate sets, whimsical wardrobes, and fairy tale sets that lets us “perfectly safe” in the company of a man so driven by profit that he’d try to swindle an old friend at grenade-point while in the process of accepting his actual blood. Do we believe this monstrosity is capable of, or even truly interested in, the possibility of meaningful reconciliation or personal change? Does it matter when it’s this much fun to watch? By the time the agnostic series of schemes culminate into a fever pitched crescendo, it’s almost surprising how effectively the dreamlike spell gives way to reveal an undercurrent of emotion with the swift economy of a tidy epilogue. It’s familiar magic from a skilled director, yet it still works every time.
The Phoenician Scheme is now playing in theaters, including on the big screen at SIFF Downtown.
Image courtesy Focus Features.