If family is the sharpest and most cutting of double-edged swords, few storytellers have ever wielded it with more violent enthusiasm than Wes Anderson, whose movies often start with — and then scab over — the seemingly mortal kind of wound that only a severed relationship can leave behind, and only a carefully mended one can ever hope to fix. In that sense and several others, “The Phoenician Scheme” is the most enthusiastically violent film that Anderson has made thus far.
Spackled together from all the gray paint and seriocomic grotesquerie that he couldn’t find a use for in his previous work, the “Asteroid City” auteur’s hectic father-daughter story takes pains to clarify a certain ethos at the root of his art, even if it does frustratingly little to flesh that ethos out any further.
We’ll go to that, but first — the violence. Like so many of Anderson’s bad dads before him, mid-century European business mogul Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) is determined to be larger than life or die trying. No one has managed to kill him quite yet, but they’re getting awfully close — as we see in a high-flying prologue that makes it weirdly easy to imagine how Anderson might have shot the first scene of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
“The Phoenician Scheme” begins with one character being shredded in half by a saboteur’s bomb, and ends with another character getting their head blown off by a hand grenade. In between those two explosions are several plane crashes, a spate of trigger-happy communist revolutionaries, and a homicidal argument over the profits from a poison gas that has killed more than 10,000 soldiers.
And yet, Zsa-zsa repeatedly insists that he feels “very safe.” For a man who mostly communicates in maxims, that might be the closest thing he has to a mantra. And why shouldn’t he feel safe? The immoveable center of a sweet but frantically spinning caper in which family is presented as the only force more inescapable than death (family is a lot of things, okay?), Zsa-zsa has effortlessly managed to elude them both for as long as he can remember. Or so he thinks. The truth of the situation, as our unscrupulous hero starts to realize after surviving his sixth plane crash, is that every step he’s taken away from one has led him closer to the other, and vice-versa.
Zsa-zsa’s relatives have been easily avoided. His three ex-wives are all deceased, even though Zsa-zsa himself appears to be indestructible, and the nine young sons he shared between them are confined to a dormitory near his mansion, where they sometimes appear on the dining room balcony so that one of them can launch flaming arrows at their father as he sits at the table below. (The kid’s aim isn’t great, but it gets a little better with each shot.)
Zsa-zsa has a lone daughter amidst his brood of boys, but he hasn’t seen the girl in six years — not since he sent Liesl away to live as a nun-in-training. That was the easiest way for him to silence the nagging suspicion that Liesl was actually sired by his dastardly half-brother Nubar, who Benedict Cumberbatch plays as a bearded cross between Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck and Agrabahanian royal vizier Jafar (no last name given).
The baron and his pious daughter seem at peace with their mutual estrangement until Zsa-zsa suddenly decides to break that habit. His latest brush with death is close enough that it earns him a general meeting with God (Bill Murray, natch), who forces Zsa-zsa to participate in a Dreyer-esque trial for his soul; a tedious and visually uninspired series of interruptions, so far as Anderson’s framing devices go. The verdict isn’t rendered until the end of the film, but a mere glimpse of the pearly gates is enough for Zsa-zsa to anoint Liesl his sole heir, and for him to make a hail Mary attempt to reconnect with her as they travel across Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia — Stefan Zweig-inspired country located somewhere between Morocco and Zubrowka — in an effort to pull off the biggest deal of Zsa-zsa’s life.
While the mystery of Liesl’s parentage drives a certain portion of the plot, that of the actress who plays her could not be more self-evident, as the character is portrayed by Anderson newcomer Mia Threapleton, a round-faced twentysomething who looks as much like a young Kate Winslet as her mom ever did. A bit of nepo casting feels apropos in a movie that braids history and destiny into a frayed knot that only grows tighter whenever someone tries to pull it apart, but it doesn’t hurt that Threapleton is also perfect in the role, wielding a deadpan that makes Zsa-zsa work as hard for her love as he does for his fortune.
That goes double for Liesl’s infatuated tutor, a Norwegian entomologist named Bjorn (a movie-stealing Michael Cera) who joins his crush and her father as they tour the country in a fundraising bid to cover “the gap” that stands between Zsa-zsa and the development project he wants to create in a poor section of Phoenicia. Possibly with slave labor. All the more reason why a consortium of the world’s bureaucrats are determined to stop Zsa-zsa by artificially inflating the price of bashable rivets. In case this movie’s denser-than-ever design wasn’t already destined to embolden the laziest of Anderson’s critics, a plot incited by the price of bashable rivets should certainly do the trick.
More linear than “Asteroid City” or “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and yet significantly harder to follow than either of them, “The Phoenician Scheme” is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding. The scale of its story is immense, in that Zsa-zsa and the gang span an entire nation in search of the money he needs to complete his deal, but the stops on their tour often feel like isolated vignettes, more focused on milking a few dry chortles out of their celebrity cameos than they are in deepening the father-daughter bond that inspired the billionaire’s cockamamy plan. At least Zsa-zsa is courteous enough to bring souvenir hand grenades with him everywhere he goes.
While the energy picks up whenever the bullets start flying (Riz Ahmed, playing a local prince, enters the movie aboard a handcar equipped with a rail gun that he isn’t afraid to use, and Richard Ayoade makes the most of his crucial role as a well-armed revolutionary), several of the comic setpieces between them have a way of belaboring their own jokes. The high-stakes basketball game that Zsa-zsa plays against a pair of railroad barons (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston) is maybe the first-ever Anderson sequence that isn’t a pleasure to look at, and the pettiness at its core — a recurring motif in a film that bemoans capitalism’s “who can lick who” mindset — is too polite for a story about a man whose family is in the murder business.
That trend continues throughout the rest of the film’s similarly contained — if more agreeably mordant — sorties, which find the gang traveling to a Casablanca-like nightclub (owned by Mathieu Amalric’s Marseille Bob), boarding a docked freighter owned by a syndicate chief named Marty (Jeffrey Wright), and an unfinished hydro-electric dam operated by Zsa-zsa’s cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), before they arrive at the palatial desert hotel where the whole thing comes to a head. Each of these sequences is surely packed full of too many quotable lines for someone to appreciate them all at first blush, but all of them run long enough without moving to create an uncomfortable tension with the film’s manic pace, and I spent most of “The Phoenician Scheme” itching to arrive at the destination instead of enjoying the journey there.
The expansiveness of the plot’s scale turns suffocating as a result, which fatally detracts from Anderson’s singular talent for achieving truth through artifice. While production designer Adam Stockhausen remains a wizard beyond compare (not even the film’s muted color palette and dreary complexion is enough to diminish his genius), the epicness of Korda’s persona feels at odds with the hermetic construction of Anderson’s diorama-like style, and there’s nothing del Toro’s winsomely wounded performance can do to give the movie some room to breathe.
Inspired by 20th century names like Onassis and Niarchos, Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda is palpably suspended in air between the breeziness of Alexandre Desplat’s score and the viciousness of the Igor Stravinsky pieces that Anderson mixes through it. “Break, but don’t bend” is his personal motto (not to be confused with his aforementioned mantra), which bodes well for the compromise the revenge-obsessed Zsa-zsa will eventually have to strike with his forgiveness-minded daughter, but “The Phoenician Scheme” is too frenetic for del Toro to chart a compelling path to his character’s come-to-Jesus-moment.
Like all of Anderson’s protagonists, Zsa-zsa picks a point on the horizon and continues to charge towards it with all of his might long after he should’ve noticed that he’s steaming towards a mirage. In this case, whatever Zsa-zsa is hoping to reach is less important than the gap he’ll have to cover on the way there, and “The Phoenician Scheme” is at its best whenever Liesl is invited to shine a light into that abyss.
Even the film’s perfectly bittersweet final moments fail to recreate the kind of emotional undertow created by the endings of “Asteroid City” or “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” when Anderson’s manic array of bric-a-brac forms an otherworldly constellation of feeling, but there are a few errant moments that manage to crystallize some tenderness from the frenzy. As Zsa-zsa grows closer to Liesl, it becomes increasingly clear that family is the gap, in addition to being the tycoon’s best hope of closing it.
Unburdened by the depth that has allowed earlier work like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Darjeeling Limited” to resonate for decades on end (even as it’s saddled with twice the texture), “The Phoenician Scheme” is free to focus all of its attention on the simple idea that family is the richest inheritance that anyone could ever hope to receive or pass down, even if some people — fathers most of all — usually have to lose everything else before they can learn to appreciate its value. “Planning doesn’t matter, Zsa-zsa says, “what matters is the sincerity of your devotion.” It’s a strange thing to hear towards the end of an Anderson film that’s been too obsessed with the planning stage to meaningfully devote itself to anything, but “The Phoenician Scheme” is a movie with its heart in the right place, and a souvenir hand grenade within arm’s reach just in case it’s needed.
Grade: B-
Focus Features will release “The Phoenician Scheme” in limited theaters on Friday, May 30 and nationwide on June 6.
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