Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme Embraces the Modest Pleasures
I myself have felt that Anderson has been testing his own breaking point for a while now. Or maybe I’d just reached mine. There’s a limit to even the most exquisite whimsy, with its perilous proximity to mere regurgitative mannerism—not that Anderson has fully activated my own personal gag reflex. There was some affecting analog nostalgia in The French Dispatch, which romanticized both the printed word and the joy that earlier generations took in absorbing it, and plenty of sophisticated ideas in Asteroid City (2023), an intricate, Matryoshka dollhouse of a movie featuring plots within plots and dreams within dreams. “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” went that film’s central manifesto, repeated somnambulistically by its entire cast, and it’s true that a sort of quasi-hypnotic torpor is a big part of the director’s arsenal. A friend of mine texted after a screening of The Phoenician Scheme to say she found “the whole thing lulling,” adding parenthetically that this was a positive. The idea of The Phoenician Scheme as a relaxation aid is funny—flatlined dialogue as Auteur ASMR—but also belies the film’s complexities as a character study and a geoeconomic burlesque. Beneath the soporific surfaces lurks an alert satirical intelligence.
On one level, Anderson’s movies serve as playgrounds for A-list actors to demonstrate their comic agility, and he keeps widening his repertory. In addition to Del Toro, who was hilariously intense in The French Dispatch as a jailed painter, return performers in The Phoenician Scheme include Scarlett Johansson, F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Murray (cast, appropriately enough, as God in the aforementioned dream scenes). He’s also got a knack for discovering fresh talent, like the wonderful child performers in Moonrise Kingdom and Asteroid City, or the Wilson brothers in his first feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), or the then-adolescent Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore (1998)—still one of the great debut performances, and still the gold standard for Anderson’s core currency, precocious melancholia. Here, he coaxes a superbly funny and controlled performance from the 24-year-old Threapleton, who maybe doesn’t quite qualify as a find in light of being Kate Winslet’s daughter, but whose talent is real. If the character of Zsa-zsa Korda offers the pleasures of familiarity—imbued with elements from Del Toro’s own personal rogues’ gallery as well as Anderson’s various alpha males—Liesl is a winningly original creation: a model of poised, picture-perfect piety who keeps stoically succumbing to temptation.
Korda’s proposal to Liesl is simple: Help him out of his current jam—a financing crisis precipitated by the “Phoenician scheme” of the title, with its multiple, interlocking construction projects—and she stands to inherit everything he owns. At first, Liesl wants no part of her father or his worldly possessions, but she decides to accept his presence in her life on a “trial basis.” Gradually, she warms to the hectic, perilous pace of their adventures together and the exotic charms of Bjorn (the eternally gangly Michael Cera, a millennial hipster–comedy figurehead somehow making his Wes World debut), her deeply smitten new tutor, who shares his knowledge of insect biology and rituals in a (suspiciously) thick Norwegian accent. “Are you an atheist?” Liesl queries him coolly, turquoise tights peeking out from beneath her resplendent white habit. “I’m a man of science,” he replies in a tone suggesting passionate depths of earthly devotion.
