The Phoenician Scheme

dir: Wes Anderson

2025

Oh look, another Wes Anderson film. I wonder if it will be preciously over-designed and exactingly composed, and have eccentric performances from quirky actors in weird costumes / uniforms?

But I jest, I jest. We know all about Wes Anderson. One of the few auteurs left whose films are immediately identifiable by every single frame visible, even by people who don’t know who he is.

I enjoy his films probably more than most people, but then I’ve always been a cheap date. Rigorous formality may not be my jam, but I do appreciate it much of the time. I think of many of the much older films that Anderson echoes, and then I think about how much more I enjoy his films in comparison while I’m watching them. And then they end, and I wonder quietly to myself “I wonder what the fuck all of that was about?”

And yet I’m also the first to admit that, enjoyable as they are, his flicks often don’t say much of anything and don’t seem to mean much in the scheme of things beyond whatever aesthetics he’s decided to precisely realise (for his own purposes).

Oh yes, and the same themes, as ever. This Scheme adds another bad dad to the rogue’s gallery Anderson has conjured over the years, and he’s a welcome addition. I just recently, in honour of the great Gene Hackman’s passing, re-watched The Royal Tenenbaums, and had the opportunity to remind myself both how great Hackman was, and what an awful father he played to those poor kids.

To the gallery of bad dads add Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda, played by another great cheeseball of an actor, being Benicio del Toro. In the 1950s he is like, I dunno, the worst bad dad of his timeline. He has nine sons that he hates and makes live in poverty across the street from where he actually lives. He is a weapons dealer and industrialist who starts wars when the Americans and Brits would prefer he didn’t, and starts peaces when the imperial powers also would prefer he didn’t. There have been many attempts on his life, including right at the start of the film.

Another plane crash to survive, another vestigial organ to try to put back in to one’s own body. Fear of his own mortality convinces Korda that he needs an heir to solidify his legacy, so he turns to his one daughter Liesel, who happens to be a nun (Mia Threapleton).

Liesel is a piece of work. Even as a novice, she believes somewhat in her calling, and, through her deadpan delivery which rarely if ever varies and would unsettle Aubrey Plaza, she indicates in no uncertain terms that she disapproves of almost every single thing her father has ever done or does now or will ever do. She is not exactly pious, but she does believe in justice, redemption and forgiveness, much to Korda’s incredulity.

He is, of course, an atheist who believes all religion to be folly, and something a powerful titan of industry need not concern himself with. Hence his comfort within his attempts to “complete” his crowning achievement, being the scheme from which the film takes its title, with slavery and famine akimbo. Slavery and imposed famines are two things straight out of the back section of the Bible yet not, unlike what this flick puts forth, things that God had a problem with back then. Old Testament God has no problem with slavery: the most I recall ever being said about it was not to beat your slaves too much lest their market value be impacted.

Zsa Zsa Korda is no godbotherer, no. If anything he’s a luxury-adoring demon who would flatten anyone and anything that would get in his way, even and especially family.

And yet each time another assassin tries to kill him, or that another plane crashes, or that he gets caught in quicksand, he briefly seems to die, and sees a black-and-white Bergmanesque heaven where God (Bill Murray) and heavenly oddball figures seem to judge him, and find him wanting. His three murdered wives also judge him (he assures us and Liesel that he wasn’t the murderer responsible for any of their deaths, and it’s not always convincing), and each time he comes back he’s a little less certain in his metaphysics, and more keen to earn Liesel’s approval.

He drags Liesel, almost against her will, across the planet as he tries to finalise the last part of his vaunted scheme (the details of which, I assure you, do not matter no matter how elaborate it might all seem and despite how intricate the miniatures representing the scheme are). Of course they travel the world, and of course the people they have to meet and convince to go along with some variation to fund the scheme (referred to as The Gap, though unfortunately they’re never referring to the clothing department store that went bankrupt in 2010 and yet somehow resurrected itself later on, which would have been fitting). And of course all of the people they have to convince are either famous faces, Anderson regulars or both, in tiny parts that other actors who have to work for a living would shun.

So of course you can get Scarlett Johansson playing a character called Cousin Hilda for three lines of dialogue and 3 minutes of screen time or Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston playing basketball for a while, or the great Jeffrey Wright as a ship’s captain or Richard Ayoade as a rebel communist leader, and it’s all going to be so amusing, perfectly shot and perfectly scored. It’s going to be comical, or funny, without necessarily making anyone laugh out loud, in the wry way fans of Anderson are used to and in fact depend on.

But if any part of these stories is going to make a difference, or have any resonance, it’s going to be the central dynamic between whoever the main character is and whoever the supporting characters are. Sure, he’s a shitty father especially, but above all a shitty person, Korda can change, must change, for his own good and hers too. It’s almost remarkable how the flick pulls that off in such a light manner.

All the while this enigmatic figure of the doubting daughter / novitiate that the convent doesn’t want, who wanders around looking perpetually astonished and, it has to be said anachronistically, wearing blue eye-shadow in ways and places where it could never have been worn before (but of course it looks fire at all times), is the moral centre of the flick. The reoccurring joke of whether she wants to be his heir, and is his heir but only on a trial basis, like her vocational calling as a nun, receives more layers to it the longer the “plot” foolishness rolls along. She is not competing to be his heir any more than he is competing to be her father. But he is trying to become a man she could admire.

Benicio Del Toro has obviously been great in a lot of things, and probably terrible in a few things, but he does wonderfully as this character. He’s a cad, an admitted cad, but he realises that’s not how he wants to leave this life, and he cannot ignore the look of disappointment on his daughter’s face.

I don’t have any proof for this, as in I’m not basing this on anything I’ve read or that the director has said in interviews, but for my money I get the strong feeling that this flick is like the opposite or the anti-matter version of an Ayn Rand story, in that the flick has, front and centre, the kind of Olympian figure that Rand would reflexively champion in her Objectivist screeds, yet instead of having that John Galt / Howard Roark / Hank Rearden-like character, who’s inherently better than all of the sub-human scum surrounding him, triumphing, the story rolls along gently and violently deconstructing that titan of industry until he’s just a simple man again, doing something he loves, spending time with the people he loves, in simple but comfortable squalor. His mighty works are meaningless, his schemes and lies never mattered; what matters is what we’re left with in the end.

It might seem or sound banal, but that could just be the way I’m describing it. Fans of his films and people who maybe watch his stuff under sufferance or at gunpoint sometimes forget, because of how fussy and constructed his productions look, that there is meaning, there are feelings and ideas and aspects of resonance through his art that he is sometimes aiming for. Maybe it doesn’t always come across because of the strict formalism of the exercise, but there is some heart there, and when he gets it right, it rings out beautifully.

I thoroughly enjoyed this flick, and would happily watch it again. I pretty much love most of Anderson’s movies, but I don’t love all of them the same, in the same ways or for the same reasons. It doesn’t blind me to their flaws, always, but it does enhance the moments I enjoy the most. His earlier flicks could seize a moment or a heart with a perfect Velvet Underground needle drop or an image so strange yet adroit that it perfectly captures something, but now he lets the ideas free flow in ways where he doesn’t have to underline it with his relentless curlicues and exactitude.

In the same way that we didn’t need to know anything about Stefan Zweig or the rise of fascism in Europe to enjoy The Grand Budapest Hotel, we wouldn’t need to know anything about oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian or the film A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to enjoy this flick either. They’re just elements of the past that cultural magpie Wes Anderson wants to plunder and resurrect, reconfigured in his own image. And more power to him.

Keep doing what you’re doing, you extraordinarily talented weirdo.

8 times grading films is meaningless when one film is a Wes Anderson film and the next one is a buddy comedy with John Cena and Idris Elba out of 10

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“Myself, I feel very safe.” – as do I - The Phoenician Scheme