I seldom laughed but often smiled during “The Phoenician Scheme,” the latest patrician comedy from Wes Anderson. Another monument to artifice from modern cinema’s fussiest auteur, “The Phoenician Scheme,” now playing in South Florida theaters, is a 1950-set picaresque about a corrupt and seemingly indestructible industrialist—Benicio del Toro’s Anatole Korda—who, after surviving his sixth assassination attempt, endeavors to transfer his business empire to his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice in the Catholic Church, despite her suspicion that Korda engineered her mother’s death. Joined by Michael Cera’s Bjorn, an eccentric tutor-turned-administrative assistant, this unlikely trio begins a trek through central Europe to shake down some of Korda’s business associates and close the remaining financial gaps in his boldest project to date, a virtual city-state run on slave labor.
The irony of Anderson’s films, with their arcane references and characters who speak in complete paragraphs, is that his densely thicketed plots often feel like window dressing—a clothesline of MacGuffins on which to hang his dryly witty bon mots and gallery-ready images. This is perhaps never truer than in “The Phoenician Scheme,” right down to its esoteric title. Like 2021’s “The French Dispatch,” the film is episodic in nature, chronicling Korda’s misadventures with a starry cast of fellow-magnates, among them railroad kingpins played by Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston; Mathieu Almaric’s fez-wearing nightclub impresario; and a ship’s captain portrayed, with his usual gusto, by Jeffrey Wright. The veritable final boss at the end of this fundraising odyssey is Korda’s nemesis and half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose feud threatens to derail the entire venture.
The appearance of beret-clad Communist revolutionaries and a shadowy cabal of government agents plotting Korda’s downfall around a semicircular table add more pieces to this jumbled puzzle of a story, which works best if you don’t worry yourself with following every last thread. As ever, we watch Anderson’s film to ogle at their designs, which is why the big screen is still the essential way to experience them.
“The Phoenician Scheme” is shot mostly in a square aspect ratio—all the better to emphasize the high-ceilinged home of Korda and the wealthy environs in which he travels—which is then divided among further squares and circles, his films as much math projects as literary ones. It’s a pity that we critics are asked to render judgments after a single screening, because Anderson’s frames are filled with Easter eggs that reward repeat viewings. “The Phoenician Scheme” is set in a rarefied world of brandy snifters, jewel-studded pipes, portable stock tickers and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Characters read (and write) books such as Fleas of the Americas. Not for nothing do the end credits list a “pinochle advisor.”
But to what does it all add up? For one, while Anderson never hammers home the point, Del Toro’s Korda, with his ability to peddle influence and dodge death, vibes with our current age of oligarchy. His recurring line, “myself, I feel very safe,” even while those around him are literally blown to bits, reflects his protected class. And there’s Anderson’s recurring preoccupation with the schisms within families, a central tenet of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic,” and that manifests around the fractured relationship between Korda and Liesl.
But the emotional tug of “Tenenbaums” is sorely missing here, where the plot is so ultimately trifling that we’re discouraged from taking any of it seriously; hence the fisticuffs between Korda and Nubar, whose Keystone slapstick reminds us that nothing is really on the line. “The Phoenician Scheme” is so aware of its own movieness that we never grow closer than arm’s length to these characters.
And yet mid-tier Wes Anderson, like mid-tier Hitchcock and (if such a thing exists) mid-tier Kubrick, is such an individualistic experience that it’s still more interesting than the work of most perfectly competent, and even prizewinning, directors. His films are not all going to be “Tenenbaums,” or “Moonrise Kingdom,” or “Asteroid City.” But the fact remains that no one else could make a movie like this. As long as studios continue to lavish him with generous budgets for idiosyncratic fare, I’ll be first in line.
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