***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson
By Angelo Muredda Midway through Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a stateless arms dealer and industrialist hated by any number of governments, drops everything to visit Marty (Jeffrey Wright), a shipping magnate from Newark, to muscle him into upping his investment in the titular scheme: a dicey Middle Eastern infrastructure deal. Physically tethered to Marty in the middle of a blood transfusion that’s necessitated by a gunshot wound he acquired in the course of securing his share from a sketchy French ally named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), Korda pushes the deal by pulling the tab of the hand grenade he brought Marty as a peace offering (the way some might bring chocolate), insisting he’ll put it back only if his pal increases his share. Unfazed by the threat of mutually assured destruction, Marty, a universal donor who’s already pushing blood from his body into Korda’s with a hand pump, pledges to give his financial share and more, “just to watch the grand finale.”
Financing, whether it’s for art or infrastructure, is clearly not for the faint of heart, requiring leaps of faith from skeptical investors who need arm-twisting and earnest audiences who, like Marty, want to see the big show. So, too, does it seem to require the steely resolve of a visionary sociopath on the level of Korda, who always has his eye on the funding gap, as represented by a visual overlay at the start of each globe-trotting visit to the next lucky shareholder. Or maybe, as Marty’s readiness to give of himself and his coiffeurs regardless of Korda’s violence suggests, it doesn’t. Often slandered by those who stopped caring for his work somewhere around The Life Aquatic as a cold, twee fusspot making the same hermetically sealed diorama film after film–even as recent works like Asteroid City have delved deeply into the psychological impulse of craftspeople, writers, directors, and actors to make simulacra of their real-life grief–Anderson delivers a charmingly contradictory portrait of the artist as a victim of his own controlling instincts, which he realizes he needs to modulate if he’s going to pass through the pearly gates. Part daddy-daughter road movie, part international espionage thriller (both of which are filtered through the filmmaker’s usual fully-realized aesthetic sensibilities), The Phoenician Scheme is also, improbably, Anderson’s tribute to living humbly without abandoning one’s tastes or skill set. It’s the work of a maximalist dreamer embracing the charms of doing good work with good people at the local level, maintaining a penchant for fine things but divesting of the bad impulses that drove him to acquire them.
Korda’s journey to that point is fraught. We meet him in the middle of an airborne assassination attempt that blasts his assistant out of his private jet in a cartoony but gory explosion. Korda barely survives the ensuing crash, having the first of many black-and-white hallucinations of the afterlife that split the difference between Bergman and Powell and Pressburger, where his attorney (Willem Dafoe) defends him before a court of yet-unseen judges–which later includes Charlotte Gainsbourg as his most recent widow, probably murdered and maybe by him–as God (portrayed by Bill Murray) decides where he belongs for eternity. Rattled by this sneak preview of his end, Korda resolves to put his house in order, provisionally entrusting his inheritance not to one of his nine adopted Dickensian urchin boys, some adopted and all interchangeable apart from one’s skills with a crossbow, but to his lone daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a Catholic nun in training (another shade of Powell and Pressburger) he deposited in the nunnery as a child to protect her from becoming collateral damage to his enemies. While a transnational cadre of those bureaucratic foes, led by the officious Excalibur (Rupert Friend), manipulates the market prices of his building materials from an anonymous boardroom to bring him down, Korda enlists Liesl and his new assistant and entomology tutor, Bjørn (Michael Cera), to accompany him on a whirlwind financing expedition to make up for that funding shortfall. Hanging in the balance is not just that funding gap but Korda’s relationship with the morally scrupulous Liesl–who wants to know what became of her mother before committing to being his successor–and, by extension, his soul.
Those who feel Anderson’s style has calcified will find plenty of evidence to suit their argument in the densely populated sets, unusual camera angles and framings (care of new DP Bruno Delbonell, who ups the pale green tones in the palette but otherwise fits nicely into Anderson’s toolbox), deadpan dialogue (Korda boils his various battles down to a matter of “Who can lick who–or whom, I guess”), quirky character designs and props (Liesl prefers a studded dagger, if she must carry a weapon), and fictitious international locales (mixed in with real ones). There’s nothing exactly new about the rapid-fire visual gags, such as one in which Korda has his wine tested for poison only for the first drop of the solution to immediately confirm his suspicions by dyeing the whole glass, but one would be churlish to treat their perfect execution as some kind of drag simply because they’re familiar. Amidst the screwball of old, though, there’s a tonal weariness that permeates, feeling new despite evoking the more plaintive moments in his filmography, in part thanks to the uncanny imagery of the dream sequences.
The political undertones of Korda’s Middle Eastern machinations–including not just slave labour, which Liesl talks him down from like a good daughter and Catholic, but an artificially engineered famine as well–are also more pointed than usual for Anderson. The Middle East might be vaguely defined as Phoenicia, and the lone representative of the anti-colonial left is a guerrilla (Richard Ayoade) whose inscrutable motives recall the flat May 1968 pastiche of The French Dispatch. But the unsavoury details of Korda’s colonial scheme feel sharp enough, from the American investors profiting from Middle Eastern resources–Marty but also the Vladmir and Estragon-like basketball-playing Sacramento investors (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston)–to the creepy European settler collaborators who put the boots on the ground to execute the project, represented by Scarlett Johansson’s militaristic, Germanic Cousin Hilda Sussman, who’s in charge of the dam he’s building in the pointedly named “Private Utopian Outpost, Middle Independent Phoenicia.”
As knotted as the almost-explicit politics get, The Phoenician Scheme, at its heart, is a relatively tight three-hander between Korda, Liesl, and the lovesick, mysterious, absurdly-accented Bjørn, who fancies Liesl and who, unbeknownst to him, sits in the exact spot on the plane where the last assistant got blown apart. (He’s perfectly played by Cera as first a goober and then a rogue.) The bulk of that weight rests on Del Toro’s more than capable shoulders. A force of life who makes things happen in the vein of Max Fischer, Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, and Mister Gustav, his Korda is a nastier sort of guy than his predecessors, barking, “Why would anybody do something I didn’t tell them to do?” like a caricature of a Wes Anderson type melting down on a set. Del Toro is no stranger to playing ambivalent characters compromised by their work, and he strikes an interesting balance here between being undaunted, prone to saying, “I myself feel safe” as others cower, and death-haunted, looking at each dubious action through the lens of that heavenly jury. Threapleton is a terrific scene partner for him and more than just the innocent foil she first promises to be, nicely balancing Liesl’s dry piousness–slapping, then forgiving and blessing Korda at one point–with the impulsiveness of her worldly taste in the likes of books and beer. Her conflict between matters earthly and eternal feels genuine, not the least because even the Church she’s committed to, which deems her insufficiently ascetic to fulfil her vows, turns out to be all too happy to take her father’s money, whether it be dirtied by slave labour or not.
Like the trio in their precarious, semi-improvised international journey, The Phoenician Scheme is balancing a number of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic elements. You’re not so sure they’ll all land in place until miraculously they do, in an understated coda that ends on a superimposed dedication, via text that occupies the left side of the screen, to Anderson’s father-in-law, Fouad Mikhael Maalouf, who is succinctly stated to have been born in Bethlehem, to have died in London, and to have been “shaded in life by the cedars of Lebanon.” An industrialist who reportedly intimidated people (Anderson included) the way Korda does, he’d have presumably gotten a kick out of the film’s death-defying patriarch. For all the inevitability around his demise that powers Korda’s journey from the start, it feels like a gentle complement to the aforementioned dedication that he makes it out of the film alive. His project funded (though not as he expected) and his life savings largely spent, Korda finds himself co-owning and running a small bistro with Liesl, learning to live with the sound of water endlessly dripping into a bucket in his kitchen–the sort of thing we had previously seen him command an unseen assistant to fix. The finale isn’t the grand one Marty hoped for but something pleasantly small, either a sign of a new direction to come for the famously grandstanding filmmaker or, maybe more poignant, a hint of a yearning to go minor that Anderson might never be able to deliver on, unless he, like Korda, learns how to get out of his own way.
