by Cain Noble-Davies
Cast:
Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Stephen Park
Intro:
… like cutting into a mound of pastel frosting, only to discover that there isn’t actually a cake underneath it.
Between creating his own late-stage Rosetta Stone with Asteroid City and the wondrously transcendental The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, Wes Anderson is in the midst of both the most prolific period of his career and, arguably, one of his greatest creative peaks. Unfortunately, while his latest is still assuredly business as usual, that appears to be all that it is.
Following the travails of business magnate and world enemy no. 1 Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) as he tries to secure funding for an ambitious (if nebulous) engineering project, the film’s narrative is that of a flying road trip starring him and his nun daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). It’s built on their growing relationship amidst all the colourful characters and settings, and oddball events like playing business as a literal sport and a couple of plane crashes, but there’s just not much meat to the central relationship. Del Toro does well at portraying this blasé yet conniving figure, and Threapleton does beautifully with her deadpan delivery, but when put together, it’s a bit of a letdown when their costume design is where most of the gravitas comes from.
Underneath its knowingly-convoluted spy-flavoured shenanigans and a respectable comedy ratio, the script and visuals flirt with a moralistic character piece, showing this dark figure closing the gap between himself and God and becoming a better person from his daughter’s influence. But through all of Anderson’s trademark aesthetic theatricality, from the symmetrical sets to the surreal staging of Korda’s near-death experiences, it’s like an attempt at the offbeat spirituality of a Coen brothers movie, but lacking the cerebral impact to really make it stick.
More than anything else, the film reads like an act of self-deprecation on Anderson’s part. A story about a rogue visionary, carefully collecting the means by which to create a monument that only seems to make sense to its creator; even for one of America’s most auteur of auteurs, he seems to be really leaning into that status here. Except, this is the first film of his in a while where the dubiousness of it having a ‘point’ actually applies. Whether it’s the rise of fascism, exchanges between cultures, writing as a life’s calling, the need for escapist fiction, or piercing the veil of the material world, there usually is substance to his style that is observable from the outside. Here, though, even the film’s strongest thematic notions feel like morsels.
The Phoenician Scheme is like cutting into a mound of pastel frosting, only to discover that there isn’t actually a cake underneath it. While it still offers a funny and well-acted experience for those who retain the palette for Anderson’s mannerisms, and there’s a somewhat refreshing introspection to its construction (forgoing nesting doll framing devices for characters under comparable layers of artifice), its driving narrative and character pathos measure out into one of his weaker efforts in recent years, as the pleasures begin and end with what’s directly on the surface.
