With his diorama-like compositions and tales of longing — usually for a loving family — Wes Anderson has taken audiences most everywhere on the planet: Asia and Europe, New York City and the American southwest, a fox’s hole and an island inhabited by dogs. With “The Phoenician Scheme” he globetrots again, zigging and zagging about, but he adds an unusual place to the list: heaven.
Or, more accurately, the pearly gates that stand just outside of heaven, guarding the way lest the unworthy sneak in. These scenes are really snippets, rendered in black and white. In them, we repeatedly glimpse the weapons dealer and generally shady business tycoon Anatole Korda, a.k.a. Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro, who is perfect) standing on some clouds before a robed assembly of what the film bills as the “biblical troupe,” among whom are F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Hope Davis and Bill Murray, who, delightfully, plays God.
That all of these screen luminaries apparently just popped to Anderson’s set for a day to film a tiny scene is indicative of where the auteur stands at this point in his 31-year career. Still boyish in appearance, he’s just turned 56, with a bevy of awards under his belt. He’s synonymous with his intricate aesthetic, which is perhaps one of the most recognizable in cinema. It’s turned him into a brand, with social media creators and critics alike drawn to examining and imitating him. He curated a show at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018, and as “The Phoenician Scheme” was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, he was simultaneously the subject of a show at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.
He’s also built a career on an ever-expanding universe of returning collaborators and players. While some, like Murray, have been around for a long time, Del Toro is still relatively new to the fold, with “The Phoenician Scheme” only his second Anderson outing (he had a role as a seductive criminal in “The French Dispatch”). He plays the cold and aloof Korda who, upon surviving his sixth assassination attempt, finally admits he needs to appoint an heir to his business and vast fortune. He has nine sons who live in a dormitory across the street from his house — Korda is not a very good dad — but he also has an estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, all deadpan chain-smoking charm), who is on the verge of taking her vows at the convent. Liesl’s moral sense is as upstanding as her father’s is utilitarian, and when he lays out his plan to her, she senses she might be able to do some good even if she doesn’t trust him.
So she convinces him to take the slightly higher ethical ground toward his big, well, scheme — the details of which are laid out so rapidly, and so sketchily, that it’s pretty clear Anderson doesn’t care if we really catch on to what Korda wants to do. Despite its title, this is not a movie about a plan, but about the man with that plan and, most important, his soul.
In fact, this is a rather soul-obsessed movie, the kind you often see from artists who have been pondering the meaning of life lately. I can’t guarantee that’s what Anderson’s been doing, but I can confirm this is the first of his films that depicts religious inquiry in any explicit way. As Korda and Liesl traipse around the world trying to drum up funding for his scheme, they meet with a series of Korda’s acquaintances and associates and relatives, all of whom reveal something about how he’s conducted his business, and life, in the past. These include but are not limited to a prince (Riz Ahmed), a pair of brothers (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a nightclub owner with the delightful moniker Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a guy named Marty (Jeffrey Wright), some militants led by a man named Sergio (Richard Ayoade), and finally two of Korda’s family members: his utopian second cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) and the grudge-bearing Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Yes, that’s a lot of names. It’s not even all of them. And that illuminates the biggest issue with “The Phoenician Scheme”: It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition. A breath or two or 10 might have been in order, a moment to contemplate what the movie’s getting at. You sometimes get the feeling it’s afraid to look too hard at itself.
That does, however, mirror how Korda has lived his life, until the moment Liesl shows up. With each visit for each new funding plea, some aspect of Korda’s life gets aired out briefly, and Liesl gets a better look at who her father really is. She also discusses God and religion and goodness with him, and with the tutor that Korda hires to travel with him and keep things intellectually interesting. The current tutor, Bjorn Lund, is an entomologist, so he’s always talking about bugs; he’s also played by Michael Cera, who somehow has never been in a Wes Anderson movie before. Thank god he’s joined that particular cinematic universe.
Korda, preternaturally calm about everything, confronts his past with outward aplomb, but there’s an uneasiness growing in him. Between these scenes, we see him at those pearly gates, experiencing the difficulties that might lie in the afterlife. It’s as if the mounting self-knowledge, prompted by Liesl’s presence in his life, is prompting the long-overdue awakening of his conscience.
And that leads to the big question the movie is asking, when you can look behind all that scurrying: Can a man like Korda be great, and also be good? Or are the two incompatible? Must conquering the world and amassing a fortune require exploiting everyone around him? (One of Liesl’s innovations in his scheme is banning the use of slave labor, for instance.) Or, to quote a book of which Liesl is quite fond, what is the real profit if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?
One of the mottoes by which Korda has lived his life is “if something gets in your way, flatten it,” a slogan that sounds suspiciously similar to the kind of advice you get from rise-and-grind TikTok gurus or ethically bendy tech executives. But the higher up you get, the flatter everything below you looks. It’s easy to forget all those humans down there. Greatness and success, “The Phoenician Scheme” suggests, are all well and good. But there’s joy that comes from returning to the three-dimensional world, to a place where you pray or you cook, where a little scotch and a game of cards with friends at the end of a long day means love.
The Phoenician Scheme
Rated PG-13 for quite a bit of comical violence. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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