THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME REVIEW

“It eventually gets bogged down in so much ridiculousness, it destroys any good will it’s built up from having such a great set-up."

I’ve been fairly ambivalent to the work by Wes Anderson lately, maybe going back to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was his last Oscar-worthy feature film. But that was also awarded mainly for the work by his below-the-line team, many of who have continued to work with Anderson ever since. Anderson’s latest, fresh off its ubiquitous Cannes premiere, seems like it’s more of the same, though it has a few significant improvements over his seemingly tried-and-true formula.

Benicio del Toro plays businessman mogul Zsa-zsa Korda, who we meet as his plane is about to crash after a shockingly “Final Destination”-like bit of uncharacteristic gore. Apparently, Korda has survived six of these crashes, and he decides it’s time to get his affairs in order by reconnecting with his daughter Liesl, a pipe-smoking, dagger-wielding nun played by Mia Threapleton, who he makes his sole heir, rather than her nine precocious younger brothers. At the same time, Korda has hired a Norwegian tutor Bjorn, who specializes in bugs, played by Michael Cera, and the three of them head off to deal with Korda’s affairs in the titular Phoenicia.

This is a great role for Benicio del Toro, quite a bit better than the one he played in The French Dispatch. Here, he’s playing a Howard Hughes/Gatsby-like character that even has elements of Trump or Guy Pearce’s billionaire from The Brutalist. It’s quite interesting to hear him doing a very different accent than his norm. Mia Threapleton is also one of the film’s true breakouts, another younger actor that Anderson has discovered ala Jason Schwartzman and the kids in Moonrise Kingdom.

Most of the other actors merely make brief appearances, and then they’re gone, and that includes Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe, who appear in a strange black-and-white dream sequence of sorts. One of the best sequences in the entire film is when Korda arrives in Phoenicia and begins negotiating various deals, beginning with Riz Ahmed’s Prince Farouk, which turns into a two-on-two basketball game with characters played by Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston. Previous Anderson players Mathieu Amalric and Jeffrey Wright show up in such tiny roles, you might wonder why bother to include them at all.

As has become Anderson’s norm, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of plot to speak of, but there is a lot of confusing business jargon going on, and it doesn’t get any simpler as it goes along either. Cera’s Norwegian accent is already getting annoying when Scarlett Johansson’s character shows up – again, so briefly– and she also has a weird accent, and you might wonder where that comes from. It’s a little strange that a filmmaker who works so much in Europe would lean on semi-xenophobic tropes by having American actors doing silly accents, but fortunately, Cera’s doesn’t last very long.

Some might think that the genius of Wes Anderson comes from his writing or casting, and that’s partially true, but it’s also in the collaborators he works with, especially below-the-line. Production designer Adam Stockhausen continues to be beneficial in bringing Anderson’s specific vision of locale to vivid life, as is cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who joins Anderson for the first time, and you can notice the difference. The musical sound of Anderson’s latest is once again entrusted to composer Alexander Desplat and music supervisor Randall Poster, and those are two constants that bring a lot to The Phoenician Scheme.

The film ends up in a ridiculous fight, between Korda and his brother Nubar (played by a bearded Benedict Cumberbatch), and though that does allow us to see some of the characters who popped in for a few scenes, it’s so over-the-top that it might lose some viewers, even as others praise its silliness.

There are elements to The Phoenician Scheme that make it one of Anderson’s stronger efforts, firstly because it’s far more focused than other recent films. It eventually gets bogged down in so much ridiculousness, it destroys any good will it’s having such a great set-up..

Rating: 6/10

The Phoenician Scheme will open in select cities on May 30 and then expand nationwide on June 6.