By Andrew Kendall
Wes Anderson’s films have always been preoccupied with finding the humour in pathos (or, conversely, the pathos in humour). For all the overt hilarity intentionally baked into his clever tableaus and the amusing rhythms of his screwball dialogue, he has been fascinated by the bleakness that comes with life and the living throughout his career. Even by those standards, his latest film, “The Phoenician Scheme”, about a wealthy 1950s businessman trying to drum up financial support for a risky project overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia while navigating a fragile reunion with his daughter, is limned with sharp melancholy. The film, recently released on digital, finds Anderson in an even more contemplative mood than usual and offers one of the highlights of the year in film.
When we meet Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benecio del Toro) at the beginning of “The Phoenician Scheme” he is moments away from fending off an assassination attempt on his life. It is neither the first, nor the last, such attempt on the ruthless and charismatic businessman whose primary interest in the film concerns plans to revamp Phoenicia through slave labour. This particular assassination attempt is significant, though. While unconscious Zsa-Zsa is transported to the afterlife, where he finds himself on trial as the parties weigh his worthiness. This near-death experience will loom over the rest of the film as he finds himself wrestling his commercial ambition against a lingering awareness of his mortality. To wit, Zsa-Zsa brokers a fragile reunion with his eldest child, and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton) from whom he has been estranged.
Perhaps forging a bond with Lisel might give his life some semblance of meaning. Liesl, in training to become a nun, is circumspect about her father’s intent. Especially since he has a slew of younger children (all boys, biological and adopted). Despite herself, she is intrigued by his bid for connection and hesitantly offers him a trial period of active fatherhood. When the two, along with Zsa-Zsa’s administrative assistant (Michael Cera as Bjørn Lund), set out to find investors for his ambitious project, the film turns the business odyssey into a rumination of failed parenthood and familiar scars.
Inspired by the death of Anderson’s father-in-law (Fouad Malouf, to whom the film is dedicated) “The Phoenician Scheme” structures itself as the tale of a man running out of time, on multiple levels. As the trio go on their journey, meeting with varying potential partners, Zsa-Zsa’s desperate attempt to convince (and deceive) potential investors into supporting his scheme becomes a key throughline for the film. As desperate is his wish for Liesl to become his heir and provide filial devotion. Unbeknownst to him, government agents around the world are plotting the best ways of destroying his unethical empire. The most urgent ticking clock, though, is his relationship with mortality. It is a film inspired by death, and film emphatically aware of it. The glimpse of the afterlife in the film’s opening becomes a recurring one. And with each intermittent glimpse into the afterlife trial to consider his readiness for heaven, the weight of his legacy settles in Zsa-Zsa’s mind.
Anderson is clearly thrilled at the formal opportunities provided by the journey motif. It gives the film a clear structure, and an immediate forward momentum. The film careens through a collection of various oddball figures who have complicated relationships with Zsa-Zsa. From Riz Ahmed’s diffident Phoenician Prince to Tom Hanks’s mistrustful businessman to Scarlett Johansson’s acerbic cousin to Mathieu Amalric’s gangster investor, Anderson is allowing familiar actors to make a meal out of their appearances. The visits give “The Phoenician Scheme” a deliberately episodic structure as each desperate attempt at financial support provides a chance for chaos and delight. The best of these visits is with Jeffrey Wright as Marty, a businessman in Newark, who Zsa-Zsa threatens to kill in a suicide bombing, unless he invests. Wright has been a winning player in Anderson’s past three films, most notably as a James Baldwin type in the excellent “The French Dispatch”. His innate ability to balance the melancholic with the humorous is a natural fit for Anderson’s vision. His role here is briefer, but a notable boon. It is in his meeting with Marty that Zsa’s-Zsa’s blustering ostentatiousness begins to break down, and where the film begins to emphasise its own awareness of the restlessness beneath his seemingly careless candour. “I suppose I’m moved by this absurd performance,” he says, of Zsa-Zsa, in a moment of astuteness. The line might as well be an observation on the rest of the films to come. Things grow absurd, but Anderson harnesses all with an emotional clarity that is astoundingly moving.
And what a performance. Hollywood has not known what to do with Benicio del Toro, an excellent actor too often relegated to archetypes like many of his Hispanic peers. Despite his excellent Oscar-winning turn at the beginning of the century in Steve Soderbergh’s “Traffic”, his brilliance has often gone under-recognised. As Zsa-Zsa, he delivers a career-highlight performance of consummate surety. He is as believably charming as he is unnervingly shifty. As warmly gregarious as he is consistently exasperating. As earnest in his pleas to his Liesel as he is nakedly duplicitous. He savours the cleverness of the lines, but it is even more devastating in the silent looks. And throughout all this, he is achingly tactile and convincing in his sadness. As Liesl, Threapleton finds a note of tired grace in her would-be ingénue. She plays excellently off del Toro, adapting to the rhythms of Anderson’s dialogue and functioning as a foil both to him and to Cera in a role that seems tailor-made for his niche acting abilities. “The Phoenician Scheme” continues Anderson’s long history of conjuring rich acting ensembles as a supreme director of actors. From Hope Davis as an observant nun, to Richard Ayoade as a revolutionary, to Willem Dafoe as a defence attorney for Zsa-Zsa in the afterlife, the film treats its audience to a feast of performers who are visibly engaged with this world.
The familiar aesthetics are at work, of course. A deliberate adherence to tightly composed shots and rigid tableaus courtesy of Bruno Delbonnel; a playfully jarring progression of editing from Barney Pilling; and a restlessly energetic score from Alexandre Desplat (one of his strongest works since his collaboration with Anderson on “The Grand Budapest Hotel”). Nonbelievers in Anderson’s approach to filmmaking might shrug at what they find to be a sameness in this visual language but if willing to invest in the world presented, they would recognise how he’s using his familiar formal appreciation for symmetry to emphasise the destructive effects of industrialism and the ambivalence of the commercial world. A recurring tendency to follow a tightly constructed tableau with a camera movement downwards or upwards to reveal something else, just out of frame, becomes part of the fabric of “The Phoenician Scheme” confronting us, and Zsa-Zsa, with the limitations of our myopia. There is always something more happening beyond one’s initial perception, and it’s an awareness the film capitalises on.
By the time the film reaches its climactic final act, after a series of twists, revelations, and further assassination attempts, Zsa-Zsa finds the precarity of his role as father and business two sides of the same coin. And both, we realise, are bound to his own familial legacy, and its limitations. In one of the scenes with Johansson’s Cousin Hilda, Zsa-Zsa hears a tale of ancestors that sums up life as a game of who could lick whom. It’s that ruthless spirit that has defined his relationships in his private and public life. By the end, we realise that Anderson has been slyly examining the value of that philosophy throughout the film. Whether Zsa-Zsa can successfully fund his eponymous Phoenician scheme becomes less urgent than the query as to whether or not he can win his internal battle to find personal fulfilment in his life.
Even when I find myself less moved by this than Anderson’s previous two works (“The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City” are likely my favourite two Anderson films), the moody tensions of “The Phoenician Scheme” feel impressively ambitious and like evidence of a director still seeking to deepen his approach to cinema. The moral ambivalence of the film, its restless relationship with decadence and wealth, and its tender move to resolution feel reminiscent both of the parental ruminations “The Royal Tenenbaums” and bound to the political curiosity of “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. Anderson’s works remain instructive for the way they seem to be in conversation with each other, but even considered on its own, “The Phoenician Scheme” is a touching contemplation on the meaning of life.
“The Phoenician Scheme” is available for purchase or rental on digital platforms like Apple TV, Amazon Video, and elsewhere