Wes Anderson Serves Up Another Weird Dish in "The Phoenician Scheme"
His latest efforts hits theaters this weekend
While most of the movie-theater fare these days is brand-based fast food, Wes Anderson manages to sneak in his kooky haute cuisine dishes. I wandered through the John Wick spinoff and the two Disney live-action remakes to dine on his cooked pigeon of a film.
And he finally offered me a proper metaphor for what his film art is. I had long thought that his works are part literary-magazine showpieces and part child-prodigy theatre. Being a hick from the sticks, all of his features, except for maybe Bottle Rocket, sparkle at me with higher-class snoot.
Yet in The Phoenician Scheme, there are a bunch of shoeboxes. These shoeboxes store the plans and wealth of the lead character, Anatole Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro). He bequeaths his wealth to his estranged daughter, a Cistercian nun (Mia Threapleton), who gets to unpack a shoebox or two during the film.
One scene has her take object after object out. Each are quirkily arranged on screen.
Voila!
An Anderson movie is a shoebox packed with weird stuff, arranged in some kind of hyper-symmetrical pattern that may or may not have any coherence.
You don’t know what’s in the shoebox until you open it. Meanwhile, he’s the child-prodigy who’s collected this stuff and is now showing you what he’s found.
Such is The Phoenician Scheme, which is sort of more of the same from Anderson. I was happy this one didn’t feature what I think are his primary screen likenesses, high-class nerd prodigies who get the privilege of showing off their IQs and their movie celebrating their IQ scores — e.g., Moonrise Kingdom, Asteroid City.
But this one, at its core, is about a father needing to reconcile with his estranged daughter.
However, given all the stuff taken out of Anderson’s shoebox, it’s easy to miss that core, and the plot.
As usual, his formal elements get displayed so conspicuously that he’s got a cinema of brilliant fragments that one never knows how to assemble. Since they are bits in the shoebox, maybe no assembly is acquired.
The plot has its core appeals: an adventure-espionage romp that has the two main characters travel to different locales trying to rearrange a business deal gone somewhat wrong.
That’s the dumbest way to put it. Truly, when you’re in a film that requires you to say the word “Phoenician” to the ticket salespeople, you’ll probably also deal with the market manipulation of rivets, Norwegian entomologists, and Lebanese infrastructure projects.
Del Toro’s Korda is ostensibly an amoral European business magnate. He’s shady, but his Christian daughter make try to make him holy via her Catholic faith. Anderson has taken “the spirit and the flesh” too literally in terms of his symbolism, or else his symbolism is a rather empty show. Nevertheless, Korda becomes a bit holier and his daughter, who becomes an ex-nun to inherit his business empire, becomes more worldly.
Korda may or may not realize the existence of the transcendent. I shouldn’t spoil this, but oh well. . . . Bill Murray plays God. He plays God in the black-and-white visions of Korda, who may or may not be seeing the afterlife, played by Anderson’s so-called “Biblical troupe” of actors, including Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe.
The father Korda must reconcile with the daughter, because he needs a valid heir, despite nine young sons. So father and daughter travel on his private plane, along with Korda’s servant (Michael Cera), to five different investment partners in the Phoenician scheme of the title, where Korda hopes to rearrange the grandest business deal of them all. All of them involve transportation connection routes in the Levant.
That sort of plot lets Anderson cast big actors to play bit parts. Who the weirdest is is up for grabs - probably Benedict Cumberbatch as Uncle Nubar, Korda’s “biblical” brother.
The weirdest scene may not be up for grabs, though — Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston play basketball against Del Toro and Riz Ahmed in a trans-mountain tunnel somewhere in “Phoenicia,” which is Anderson-code for the Levant.
I will never see another scene that had these actors doing something that nonsensical for inexplicable reasons. Cranston wears a Stanford shirt and sweats, while Hanks wears Pepperdine.
Actually, since Anderson has his own version of visual jazz — let’s call it Quirk Bop — he’s riffing on a typical movie scene in which people settle business negotiations with a moment of betting, gambling, or some skill-plus-chance element. That he’s invested his literary efforts in underground Syrian basketball means he is soon reaching a point where he can’t top his Quirk Bop riffs.
The Anderson style for acting is to show little emotion, possibly to highlight repression and trauma, or possibly because he’s still too in love with late 1980s Peter Greenaway films.
Whatever the case, he once again juxtaposes the delight of his visual forms with the undelight of the characters he creates. Cold emotions, warm colors. He remains possibly the director with the greatest flare for beautiful typography, and The Phoenician Scheme might be his best effort in that category.
I exit this film like almost all of his others — confused as to what plot points I missed, cold at the seeming lack of human warmth, stunned at the design and construction. I confess that I don’t care for most of his movies, yet Asteroid City grew on me and I think The French Dispatch might be the closest to a living Orson-Welles effort that we will ever witness.
Because the film has two toes dipped in the espionage genre, with the strangest praise for rogue business dealings that, as the daughter says, may end up doing some good in the world, despite their flawed origins, The Phoenician Scheme may end up growing on me as well.
Just know that it’s the weirdest tasting dish at your local cinema.
In the movie, the characters dine repeatedly on “young pigeon roasted like Peking duck,” one of those visual cues and possible symbols that Anderson takes out of his cinematic shoebox. Most people I know think that dish is too weird for them. There you go, chew carefully or leave.