"The Phoenician Scheme" review — Forgiveness for the merciless man
“Myself, I feel quite safe.”
When something gets in your way, flatten it. That’s the motto by which arms dealer and businessman Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda lives his life. And Korda knows nothing else. His violent tendencies, profound destructive influence on geopolitics, and total disregard for any value in human life might just be building up towards his own violent end. He’s been the victim of dozens of (unsuccessful) assassinations, including poisonings, shootings, bombings, and plane crashes. So far, Korda has proved that he might just be indestructible, but with his most ridiculous business plot about to come to fruition, Korda might need to find some help, both spiritual and practical. With The Phoenician Scheme, his twelfth feature film, Wes Anderson is searching for a redemption story through Korda, whose complex relationship with his estranged daughter, Liesl, a novitiate nun, sends him on a course for divine forgiveness. But even when God feels a little far off, Korda can at least make the promise that he won’t use slave labour so much. While caught up in the heavens with its nods to religion and spiritual forgiveness, this is also a profoundly violent film, which, when paired with Anderson’s ever-delicious deadpan comedic sensibilities and a brilliant ensemble, makes for a good time, if not quite a great time.
It’s been a whirlwind few years for Anderson, who has released four projects (three features and a feature-length collection of short films) since fall 2021. Coming off a string of films that pushed Anderson’s stylings to the maximum, The Phoenician Scheme finds itself a little more stylistically restrained than its immediate post-COVID predecessors and much more thematically limited than the rest of his oeuvre. Whereas the past three films, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, have all been exercises in artifice and theatricality, The Phoenician Scheme is much more pared down in its visual impulses. It doesn’t have the obvious theatrical effects of Henry Sugar, the narrative and stylistic movement of The French Dispatch, or the grandiose metanarrative of Asteroid City. It’s conceptually leaner, keeping the viewer in the fictional world at all times. Don’t be alarmed: the doll house sets, intricate blocking, idyllic framing, and 4:3 aspect ratios are very present here, lest you be worried. This is also not a return to the melancholic, emotionally palpable films of Anderson’s early career, like The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic. This is something else entirely. Cut from more farcical cloth than ever before, The Phoenician Scheme is a simpler, streamlined Anderson. It’s far from a highlight of his filmography, but with a filmmaker so competent and a cast so electric, it’s hard to be steered wrong.
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| Photo via Focus Features. |
Zsa-Zsa Korda (played by the brilliantly amoral Benicio del Toro) is hatching a plot for a multi-part business and infrastructure venture in the nation of Phoenicia (a vaguely Middle Eastern desert country), which would set him and his family up for financial success for generations. But when the world’s governments artificially inflate the price of key construction pieces in order to sink Korda and his less-than-legal operations, Zsa-Zsa needs to get his key investors to cover the newfound financial “gap” in the plan: the gap between his total investment costs and the possible payout. All the while, the threats against his life are becoming all the more severe, which sends Zsa-Zsa on a mission to convince his estranged daughter, Liesl (in a fabulous debut role from Mia Threapleton), the offspring of his first of three deceased wives and the oldest of ten children, the rest boys, to take over as sole heir to his estate. Liesl is hesitant: her devout Catholic views make her a strong ideological opponent to her father’s use of violence, exploitation, and famine. On a trial of her ability to serve as heir of the Korda fortune, Zsa-Zsa takes Liesl and Nordic entomologist Bjørn (played by the immaculate Michael Cera) on a whirlwind tour to visit the investors before time runs out on the project. Meanwhile, visions of a heavenly trial to determine the eternal soul — populated by all three of his deceased wives, his defence attorney, and a version of God played by Bill Murray — haunt Zsa-Zsa’s dreams.
Anderson’s vivid sense of imagination defines this film, filling it with all of the usual charm that accompanies his work. We return to the pastel visual pallets, the artificial sets, highly symmetrical frames, excellent musical choices, deadpan line deliveries, and all of the usual flairs that make Anderson Anderson. The man is the definition of distinct style, and the only way to truly appreciate what he does visually is to engage with his work. The artifice isn’t an integral part of the film’s narrative, like how Asteroid City plays with the film’s obvious effects by having part of its story be about theatre or how Henry Sugar is a children’s picture book, which makes it a little less playful or creative, but it is still a welcome sight. Anderson is incredibly confident in his filmmaking language, making The Phoenician Scheme a comic delight. In its plotting, the film gets messy. Unlike what the title suggests, Korda is operating less of a “scheme” and more of a hastily thrown-together dash to see which of the wealthy investors can be fooled into covering this sudden new misfortune. The business dealings here end up being the least interesting part of the drama, but occupy a substantial portion of the runtime. While the performances and wanton violence perpetuated by Zsa-Zsa and his associates are often a point of great humour, the details of Zsa-Zsa’s venture are difficult to ascertain, and the motivations of each investor are obfuscated behind the arguments. Perhaps there is a point to be made here about the futility of trying to do business with someone as violent and unruly as Korda, but the dealings never fully descend into the madness they crave, meaning that the viewer must still try to keep up with an increasingly confused financial plotting.
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| Photo via Focus Features. |
In keeping with recent Anderson offerings, the ensemble cast sprawls with fabulous bit parts and fabulously imagined characters, although the sheer pace of the film and the overwhelming number of characters means that the film spends far too little time with any of them. The cast is adorned with some of Anderson’s most frequent collaborators and a slew of new faces in his ensemble of actors. Riz Ahmed plays the charming, yet caddish Prince Farouk, who allies with Zsa-Zsa to take on basketball-loving California business partners and brothers Leland and Reagan, played with perfect intensity by Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, respectively. Matthew Amalric plays a quick-to-anger French nightclub owner, Jeffrey Wright plays a violent American sea captain, and Scarlett Johansson plays Zsa-Zsa’s distant second cousin and his potential fourth wife. Richard Ayoade bounces around the film as an ideologically committed, yet rather considerate, communist guerrilla and Benedict Cumberbatch, armed with a wild and frightening beard and set of eyebrows, plays our main villain, Korda’s half-brother, Nubar. It’s Michael Cera’s dazzling turn as Bjørn, however, the clumsy Nordic entomologist hired to give Zsa-Zsa private lessons on insects with a secret of his own, that manages to marvellously upstage the rest of this already colourful ensemble. Cera’s first appearance in an Anderson movie is a match made in heaven and leaves the viewer wondering why this collaboration never happened sooner.
This sheer volume of A-list performers has been a staple of Anderson’s more recent feature film work. But where The French Dispatch and Asteroid City could justify their massive ensembles through an anthology structure of newspaper reports or by fleshing out the titular fictional town’s population, The Phoenician Scheme simply feels disconnected and chaotic. This is, in my mind, the most scatterbrained of Anderson’s films. There are glimmers of brilliant ideas scattered throughout, and a few compelling emotional ideas that filter the primary action. Zsa-Zsa Korda is a merciless, heartless protagonist, which makes him one of the most compelling in the Anderson library of stories, as his relationship with his pious daughter forces them both to change and compromise in search of not only a restored relationship but internal peace. As the visions of heaven play out in the mind of Korda, who starts the film in the fiery wreckage of his sixth survived plane crash, there is a question asked of the viewer, “What can the merciless man do to attain forgiveness?” which forms the thematic core of the film. It’s easy to liken Korda to the many wealthy oligarchs who run the world today, who employ blatantly corrupt tactics to influence the wheels of power to turn to their advantage. The film demands that we spend time with a man whom we are right to oppose without question and then creates the perfect comedic set-up to create empathy, or at least some pity, for him. The challenge here is that this complex emotional framework is not given the chance to breathe.
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| Photo via Focus Features. |
Del Toro’s stunning work as the lead of the film somehow manages to find empathy with the viewer, leading to a central character both weighty and incredibly funny. Threapleton plays off of him with ease as his austere daughter. The sense of humour here is undeniably entertaining. The casual violence and the repeated offer of “Help yourself to a hand grenade” make for an experience both jarring and brilliantly comic. But there’s a missing emotional resonance that is clouded by a sea of characters and an annoyingly convoluted business scheme. While The Phoenician Scheme is much more of a return to form for those who missed the more narratively simplistic work of Anderson, he can’t quite find the melancholy that made family stories like The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox work so well. Not quite esoteric or sprawling enough to be an epic, but neither personal enough to be emotionally stunning, The Phoenician Scheme finds itself in an awkward middle ground. This is still, without a doubt, a highly polished film by one of the finest working filmmakers today, and so any frame which receives the Wes Anderson touch is going to be special. It’s breathtakingly funny, full of lively characters, and constructed of dialogue that is instantly memorable. But the purity in its comedy means that The Phoenician Scheme is missing out on that X factor that would make it one of the director’s stronger works.
The Phoenician Scheme is now playing in theatres.
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