The question of whether Wes Anderson can continue to out-Wes Anderson himself is a persistent one in the minds of fans and critics alike every time his identifiable imagery finds its way back to the big screen. The prolific connoisseur of symmetry and style has faced it throughout his career, as his distinctive visual iconography and ensemble casts have grown more expansive and complex with each ensuing project. It’s almost impossibly remarkable that he has continued to answer with a resounding yes, leveling up his caricature-esque persona to new heights many times over. But this exponentially developing pattern of whimsically dioramic delights and signature cinematic ornament was bound to reach a breaking point, or at minimum, require experimentation and adaptation before audiences, or even the author himself, grew tired of the act.
Anderson certainly exhibited no signs of stopping in his most profound interrogation of social paranoia, Asteroid City (2023), infiltrating the capacity of art to grapple with those exact issues. It’s his most realized work (and his most meta), where the intersection of style, substance, and formal conceit enhance each other in a brilliant stroke of artistic balance where artifice and reality are blurred beyond recognition. This time, the artificial pastel dreamscapes and signatory deadpan deliveries of The Phoenician Scheme are the background for something darker, thornier, and more politically sour. This transition reveals a friction between form and function, allowing external noise to infiltrate the magic. The craftsmanship is impossible to ignore, but its kooky construction is a self-planted land mine that not even the aesthete himself can avoid igniting.
The setup is classically Andersonian in the complexly defined features of its obtuse characters: Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro in a rare leading role), a reclusive and delusionally confident magnate, appoints his only daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a devout nun who he has not spoken to in six years, as the sole heir to his vast estate. She begrudgingly accepts on a trial basis–he’s a godless man after all. Money can’t buy faith (or family), but Zsa-zsa is certainly willing to try. And try he does, hosting nine sons, some of whom adopted, in a dormitory adjacent to his Mar-a…I mean Mediterranean mansion, in the off-chance one of them is the next Einstein.
He also enlists the help of a tutor-turned-administrative assistant (a pitch-perfect Michael Cera), who is a match made in heaven delivering the frazzle of a recruit drafted into the role of watchkeeper for a rucksack of cash and a palette of hand grenades. The previous attendee was blown in half in an assassination attempt on Zsa-zsa, not the first, nor the last.
For a director whose assembly of sprawling ensembles is a storytelling feature and commercial selling point (at the rate he’s operating we’ll have to evaluate the standard poster dimensions to contain the exhaustive list of A-listers), The Phoenician Scheme is a surprising three-hander, The supporting figures, including but not limited to, a nightclub owner named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a prince named Farouk (Riz Ahmed), a skilled set of basketball playing brothers (Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks), second-cousin and platonic life partner Hilda (Scarlett Johnasson), and Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). They are little more than sporadic guests in Zsa-zsa’s crowdfunding plot, often featured in vignettes that slow the narrative pulse. He wants money from them to cover “the gap,” but how their pieces fit into the larger puzzle is hastily overlooked. As the impromptu team embarks on the vast titular “scheme”–a financial venture whose details are hosted in a collection of shoeboxes–Zsa-zsa’s position of power unravels, and so too does Anderson’s own sense of formal invincibility.
A distinct tonal phase change defines The Phoenician Scheme. It begins with Anderson’s typical playfulness–the linguistic overcomplication, the symmetrical settings, and strictly geometric camera movements. But slowly, the external world seeps in: a governmental panel shifts global markets, foreign spies are exposed, and revolutionary communist violence actually succeeds. God himself holds an audience with Zsa-zsa, who is stuck in a purgatory between earning the affection of his philanthropically minded daughter, who has taken the vows of poverty and chastity, and the suffering he has inevitably invoked to acquire it. Through this friction, the color palette doesn’t change, the silly physical comedy persists, but the mood curdles as Anderson attempts to fight with something he doesn’t have the courage to meaningfully contend with–the mortality of the 1%.
The outside world is infiltrating his creative process–one that is typically insular and escapist (think of the sun-baked summer camp of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and the autumnal aura of Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Still, while the presence of things like tariffs and the economic stronghold of the 1% are undeniably visible, the binary format and style of Anderson’s filmmaking restrict him from saying anything meaningful about it. He’s more interested in making a silly faux pas at the intersection of film noir and billionaire administrations than commenting on his subject matter with grit and integrity. It plays weak. The form of his movies (whimsical, ambiguous fictional dream worlds) can be a realm to comment on important themes, as seen with Asteroid City, but instead, this time, there’s a negative friction between the form and its possible thematic impact, failing to enhance each other.
There’s an underlying sadness in witnessing an auteur of prolific control and discipline allow the outside in, to be infiltrated by the world’s woes (there are many, and they are undeniably woeful). But in a country run by an authoritarian businessman who published a part-memoir part business advice book titled “The Art of the Deal,” 30 years before bludgeoning his way into the leader of the free world, maybe it’s not so peculiar that even the wizard of whimsy would attempt to engage with the philosophy of business-oriented dealmaking. Perhaps it’s also not so peculiar that an auteur whose signature style has been commodified and artificially rendered would be dissuaded by the violent manipulation of democratic capitalism despite being one of our most insular and uncompromising artists.
The film’s failure is not just the melancholy of an attempt to find a farce in a man contemplating the future of his fortune. It’s the sadness of realizing that even the most tightly constructed aesthetic regime can’t keep the real world at bay forever. For a filmmaker who built his empire on control, symmetry, and exquisite insulation, The Phoenician Scheme feels like a subtle surrender to chaos. The plot itself is an inscrutable concept of a scheme with ill-defined characters and vague motivations that serve as little more than comedic distraction from the movie’s failed pursuit: to interrogate the mortality of a business mogul whose motto is “If something gets in your way, flatten it.” One can only wonder what off-screen lawyer taught Zsa-zsa that phrase.
Anderson, ever the auteur of carefully curated internal worlds, has made a film about what happens when the outside noise–the political, the economic, the spiritual–becomes too loud to ignore, and the legacy of power and fortune is as mortal as the rest of us. In a world where billionaires deliver manifestos and exert economic policy with executive immunity, where aesthetics are endlessly mimicked in 60-second bursts, even Anderson can’t fully come to terms with whatever it is that brings us closer to Heaven. The Phoenician Scheme is certainly not Anderson’s most cohesive film, nor his most emotionally resonant. It will not be his funniest or most beloved. It’s cold, detached, and distanced, but it also might be his most revealing.
It’s a movie about losing faith in the systems we build, families, fortunes, filmographies, and the flickering hope that something honest might still be found in their collapse.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Credit to Focus Features