The two most interesting moments in The Phoenician Scheme — the latest from director Wes Anderson — come at the beginning and end of the movie. As for what happens in between, we’ll get there.
By the beginning, I don’t mean the actual opening of The Phoenician Scheme, where wealthy industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is almost killed in a plane crash — another assassination attempt, by his estimation — but the opening credits where Korda heals in a gorgeous bathroom that looks like a wealthy child’s dollhouse. Nurses in white enter and exit the room and attend to Korda’s every need, including icing down a bottle of champagne. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel gives the image an authorial air by shooting from above, and Anderson makes it hypnotic by filming the scene in slow motion but having his actors move on the double. The result isn’t regular speed but something adjacent to it.
Though I count myself a fan of his movies, my knowledge of Anderson’s oeuvre isn’t as intimate as others. Still, this image feels new for the filmmaker. Another technique to add to his bulging quiver of aesthetics: fastidious compositions, planimetric framing, varying aspect ratios, palette switches from color to black and white, and an endless array of recognizable actors who populate these worlds, even in the smallest of roles.
But it was the end — the epilogue, to be precise — that won me over. Free from booming pronouncements or a grand conclusion, Anderson and story co-writer Roman Coppola close their expansive tale in the smallest of spaces. It’s so charming and cozy I wanted to spend the entirety of the film in that restaurant backroom playing gin rummy with Korda and his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Proof positive that when Anderson is dialed in, he can be one of the best in the business.
In between those two moments, The Phoenician Scheme is a bit of a mess: overwrought, affected, boring and — to use a word I never thought I would attribute to an Anderson movie — sloppy.
The story revolves around business dealings and boardroom scheming. Korda, an unscrupulous businessman if ever there was one, wants to build a dam-slash-railroad-slash-pleasure boat whatsit for reasons that don’t actually matter to the narrative. What matters is that a syndicate conspires to raise the cost of rivets and put Korda in the red. So Korda globetrots to visit his investors and swindle them into covering the gap. Along the way, he adopts his presumed daughter, Liesl, on a trial basis. If she lasts, she’ll inherit all of his dishonest wealth. So the pipe-chomping suspicious offspring tags along not for financial reasons but because she wants to learn the truth of her mother’s murder.
Joining them is Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian tutor who specializes in bugs and is most certainly not a spy with a cartoonish accent. Why Cera gets away with such a caricature portrait is beyond me. In another movie, it would be ridiculous. Here, it’s par for the course.
He’s not the only one who feels off. Threapleton plays Liesl as if she’s seen it all and then some. If she were a 45-year-old madam, I might buy her detachment, but as a 20-something nun fresh from the convent, she seems too world-weary for her own good. Del Toro’s Korda is enigmatic to the point of confusion, verbose to the point of exhaustion. I’m not sure I know what he wants. I’m also not sure he knows what he wants. I think Korda wants to play gin rummy with his daughter in the backroom of a small restaurant. And since that’s where I want to be, too, maybe that’s where Anderson wants us all. Search me why he walks the path he does to get there.
The Phoenician Scheme isn’t free from humor, both in the writing and in the execution, but the hallmarks that make for a compelling Anderson picture miss their mark. The filmmaker has often been dogged by the notion that he’s too precious with his worlds, his characters and his stories. But here, a little bit of preciousness would have gone a long way.
ON SCREEN: The Phoenician Scheme opens in limited release May 30, everywhere June 6.