Wes Anderson's Undoing: The Phoenician Scheme
The absurd has always been Anderson’s tactic. One question: how much longer will you let him get away with it?
Grade: B+
I’m not going to let you hand-grenade yourself as a business tactic. Liesl (Mia Threapleton) says this to her father, shady yet maverick billionaire industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), in Wes Anderson’s new film The Phoenician Scheme. He’s threatened to blow himself and a business partner up with a hand-grenade unless his partner agrees to alter their agreement. It’s absurd but you won’t mind because this is a Wes Anderson film. The absurd has always been Anderson’s tactic. One question: how much longer will you let him get away with it?
Over his career, Anderson has cultivated his own idiosyncratic style that eschews reality with such honest blatancy that you no longer expect his films to be coherently dramatized. His films always contain feints at characterisation and theme that never advance into fully-fledged character arcs or realised value conflicts, simply because his characters are deadpan cartoons who put Monty Python’s characters to shame. You don’t think they really do have emotions or values any more than you think Daffy Duck does. Written by Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme tells how Korda tries to complete the “most important project of [his] lifetime,” the titular scheme, while bringing Liesl along after appointing her sole heir to his estate “on a trial basis.”
In Anderson’s The French Dispatch, del Toro played the homicidal and incarcerated artist and in The Phoenician Scheme he looks like King Kong in a suit. That’s meant as a compliment. He’s got a gorgeous, punch-drunk bestiality to him, like an Errol Flynn swashbuckler left on an island too long. You’ll expect Threapleton to star as the Mona Lisa in a Da Vinci biopic next. Her gloriously severe, heart-shaped face permits no insight into her character’s soul if she even has one but you find you don’t want to look inside but only at her visage that she freezes into a marble mask. Actually, forget Mona Lisa. Athena should be her next role.
In The French Dispatch and his most recent film Asteroid City, Anderson abandoned plot entirely for the humour that’s the reason you go and see his movies. The Phoenician Scheme is a turn back to films like The Grand Budapest Hotel that still had plots even if they were absurdly executed. Korda and Liesl jet around the fictional nation Phoenicia to renegotiate Korda’s scheme with its various stakeholders and salvage it after government espionage and sabotage leaves them with a capital gap. As they do, they play basketball against two of Korda’s business partners, crash land in the jungle before being rescued by guerilla fighters and find dynamite on their plane. They find it will explode, blow up the plane and kill them both in eighteen minutes. No problem, Korda says. We’ll land in ten minutes. I feel perfectly safe.
You don’t go to The Phoenician Scheme to know exactly what the ‘scheme’ is or why Korda wants Liesl to be sole heir to his estate. You go for moments like that when Korda and Liesl find the dynamite on their plan and he says it’s not a problem. For that, you forgive Anderson his lack of anything other than his trademark mise en scene and humour.
Yet how much longer can this show go on? Anderson’s lack of plot, character, theme and anything else making his films anything more than beautifully wrapped comedy shows mean that watching his last film is a lot like watching his latest one. While watching The Phoenician Scheme, you may start to wonder if you’ll go and see Anderson’s next film. You know exactly what to expect from a Wes Anderson movie. That may be his undoing.