Wes Anderson Takes On the Oligarchs in The Phoenician Scheme

In the cold open of Wes Anderson’s new film, The Phoenician Scheme, we see a man blown in half by a bomb. A streak of bright red blood spatters on the wall above the lower half of his body, still buckled into its airplane seat. There has been mild violence in Anderson films before, and the director has often been blunt and dispassionate while doling out the fates of characters. But this moment feels like an escalation. The Phoenician Scheme, which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, is trying for something more than diorama-box whimsy.

The film’s closest relative in the Anderson curio cabinet is probably The Grand Budapest Hotel, a WWII-coded adventure that gallivants across a mountainous fantasy Europe at the dawn of fascism in the 1930s. The Phoenician Scheme moves the action up twenty years to the strange post-war days in which a world is being rebuilt, new threats loom, and shadowy actors scramble to wield as much influence—and make as much money—as they can.

Benicio del Toro plays one of those ruthless opportunists: Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, a wealthy wheeler-dealer of vague extraction who is constantly thwarting—or, at the very least, miraculously surviving—various assassination attempts. His plane is bombed; he’s shot; he narrowly avoids drinking poison. He’s hated the world over, and for good reason. Zsa-zsa is a builder of things, but he does so with a heavy hand, exploiting local workers (indeed, the word “slaves” is used frequently throughout the film) and unsettling the global political balance. He’s made enemies of other governments, of other sinister masters of the universe, and of his family.

Zsa-zsa is in some senses a return to the lovably rakish allure of Royal Tenenbaum, the bad dad played with hustling zeal by the late Gene Hackman. Royal is perhaps Anderson’s single greatest creation, a figure both loathsome and pitifully endearing. Del Toro ably crafts his own version of that puzzling duality, albeit on a grander scale. Zsa-zsa has done terrible things, and plans to do more. Yet there is something charming about his heedlessness, a confidence that suggests he may actually know the secret machinery that governs all things.

His motivations are complicated by the arrival of his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate summoned from her convent to be named sole heir to her father’s fortune. She’s suspicious of her estranged father, but drawn to him too. There is also a concern for her nine brothers, a cadre of lost boys either born to Zsa-zsa or adopted in the hopes that they will one day develop some skill useful to their father. Zsa-zsa finds his sons untrustworthy, and so turns to his only daughter, counseling her in the ways of his business as he tries to rescue his fortune from the disastrous interference of an American intelligence agency.

Thus begins the episodic ramble of the film. Zsa-zsa and Liesl hop around a fictional region that is styled as a mix of southern Europe and North Africa. As he did in his last film, the lovely Asteroid City, Anderson makes fine use of desert vistas, all soothing austerity and whispering loneliness. As suggested at the start of the film, the film’s plucky, pensive mood is occasionally interrupted by bursts of violence that remind us of the high stakes of Zsa-zsa’s game of world domination.

Despite all that supposed intrigue, the plot of The Phoenician Scheme goes awfully slack. As father and daughter call on various associates to plead for loans that will keep Zsa-zsa’s enterprise afloat—played by a host of big names like Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, and Benedict Cumberbatch—the film meanders into tedium. As he tends to do, Anderson alienates the viewer from his meticulously crafted but chilly creation. Del Toro and Threapleton give winsome performances, but they’re not enough to sustain our interest. The ornately articulated surreality of the film is its main detriment; with no significant tether to real life, The Phoenician Scheme quickly floats away into frustrating abstraction.

But Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet—and, in some ways, provocative—moral argument. The Phoenician Scheme is, in all its Andersonian obfuscation, about the tyranny of oligarchy and the hoarding of wealth, a call to sanity and compassion targetting the rich crazies currently making a mint and a mess out of our planet. Anderson’s longtime fascination with aristocracy, barbed but loving, prevents him from making any truly harsh pronouncements about their cruelties and excesses. But The Phoenician Scheme does at least imagine a simpler way of being, one of harmless personal contentment.

Anderson’s film leaves us on that humanist note, a moment of hush and harmony that stands in stark contrast to the film’s bloody beginning. It’s a poignant, if a bit trite, message, this veneration of a modest and decent life that our own weird zillionaires might actually enjoy if they stopped ripping out the wiring of democracy and building armies of offspring. But those people likely won’t see this film, which leaves the rest of us to yet again learn their lesson for them.

This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth Cannes coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.

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