THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
2025
Directed by Wes Anderson
Written by Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson
As an enormous fan of Wes Anderson, I don't want you to get the wrong idea if I were to suggest that the filmmaker has been on a downswing: for one thing, a downswing from a 2010s that constitute a run of sustained excellence (particularly if you don't mind stretching "Anderson's 2010s" to count 2021's The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, which to my understanding was more-or-less completed before January 1st, 2020) leaves a whole lot of room to still be pretty dang excellent; for another, if only all filmmakers had downswings like this, the world would be a much better place. And even so, Asteroid City and the complex of Roald Dahl short films for streaming that I find is best filed under the title The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar—because they absolutely do too constitute a "feature film anthology," and fan or not, I'm not actually that charmed that Anderson cheated his way into his first Academy Award—are, to be blunt about it, just not as good as his 2010s films (we can quibble viz. Isle of Dogs), and though they might be very rewarding films, Asteroid City in particular was a little worrisome in the way it openly pondered, as something very close to a matter of text, what this whole "Wes Anderson" enterprise was even for. After now having seen it twice, I'm more satisfied than I was in 2023 that I "got" it to the extent it's even intended to be gettable, which isn't as much as most movies, and I do think it offers an answer to the question of Wes Anderson that works for me; in conjunction with Henry Sugar, it felt like that answer also worked for Anderson himself, for those films saw him pushing his abiding aesthetic concerns with artifice and narrative distance and stagecraft-like filmmaking to heretofore unheard-of places, and if each one, taken as a whole, doesn't amount to something as "good" as e.g. Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel, they were still wild, and left me excited to see how he would ever manage to somehow be even more of a Wes Anderson the next time, a challenge he had not, for over a decade, failed to meet.
And now along comes The Phoenician Scheme, and it represents, for the first time in a long time, a retreat back up the downward spiral, in that it doesn't, really, do much of anything new with his style—there's some black-and-white segments that invert into negative images, which is cute, but not exactly some profound new addition to Anderson's vocabulary—and in all respects it feels kind of slight, even for late (later? middle?) Anderson, who has a reputation for fussy perfectionism but has also made three feature-equivalents in three years, so it's simply the objective truth that he's been working at a rather higher tempo than most of his peers, at least to the extent we can say that he has peers. Even the stagey minimalism of the backdrops, which Anderson, via trusty production designer Adam Stockhausen, has pushed to arguably their most minimalistic state yet in any of their avowed features, is more of a lateral move from Asteroid City (with somewhat similar parameters to that "desert opportunity"), and it's obviously beaten by Henry Sugar, since to exceed Henry Sugar on minimalism, Anderson would need to go out and make a movie entirely out of kinestatic montage of set photos or something. (The kinestatic montage of documents and diagrams is present in The Phoenician Scheme, but I daresay it's become less ornate; even the big children's book-style diagrammatic model of the infrastructural program that is the titular "scheme" is weirdly—even accidentally?—downplayed as a result of intervening plot events.)
I think there's maybe even the faintest suggestion that The Phoenician Scheme is kind of cheap and banged-out, something difficult to disentangle from Anderson's pursuit of purity as he understands it—just in terms of cost, at $30 million it's actually his most expensive movie in a little while, though that's more a matter of inflation—but even this is, I suspect, as much a function of Anderson not having access to his usual cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, that role filled instead by Bruno Delbonnel, who's an awfully talented DP himself, but who's been asked to execute a Yeoman impression that I'm not entirely sure he was up to, since, anyhow, while we're certainly still getting all the lateral diorama dollies and four-square 90 degree swivels and occasional emphatic push-ins and everything else that Anderson likes to build his movies out of these days (this is still a more intentionally-made movie than 95% of everything out there and that counts for plenty), Yeoman was also very good at getting a richness out of Anderson's minimalism, and this is a mite drabber. (There's a gorgeous credits sequence, a top-down planimetric of a ginormous and elegant bathroom, that's mostly a study in slow-motion movement and text placement, that concludes with a sequence of bold, filtered monochromes, that's almost like a list of colors that aren't going to actually be in the movie.) Anderson's brief for Delbonnel also included a 1.48:1 aspect ratio—and just one for pretty much the entire movie? is that still legal?—and I don't even know what that aspect ratio is, except the entire time I was watching it in a theater, where this isn't as immediately obvious, I thought it was "just normal," but, oh wow, it's not.
"Banged-out" is, in this circumstance, rather more insulting than I'd like it to be, for The Phoenician Scheme was, after its fashion, made as a consolation for Anderson's girlfriend (partner, if you prefer, a mother-of-his-child kinda girlfriend), Juman Malouf, whose father Fouad passed in 2022; Anderson evidently liked his kid's grandfather a lot, and saw in him a larger-than-life figure of entrepreneurial swagger. Of Lebanese origins, the Maloufs suggested the "Phoenicia" of this Scheme, a make-pretend land that, in its Andersonian treatment, is obviously going to be the object of mid-century neocolonial struggle, in a light and frothy way with Eurospy overtones, F. Malouf himself being represented, loosely, as an outsider to Phoenicia, presumptively a Hungarian, played by a Puerto Rican, a certain Anatole "Zsa-zsa" Korda (Benicio Del Toro). Korda is an infamous international financier, a scion of an armaments empire who has achieved even greater wealth by extracting enormous commissions as a broker of trade deals and infrastructural projects, and presently he's working on the completion of his masterpiece, a railroad and canal that will catapult Phoenicia into the 20th century, unfortunately to be built via slave labor (try "I believe they receive a small stipend," for a taste of the bone-dry humor that's the principal product of this screenplay); perhaps not surprisingly, people are constantly trying to assassinate Korda, and indeed we first meet him as a bomb on his plane goes off, occasioning a remarkably hilarious and unexpected gore effect courtesy his personal secretary who was in the back of the plane, and after a jump cut is no longer entirely so.
He survives, as he has survived numerous plane crashes, but Korda's enemies are capable of greater subtleties, too, and the Americans (represented primarily by Rupert Friend doing an amazing Robert McNamara impression) determine to manipulate the markets to damage Korda's position, which brings to the fore the various weaknesses in his Punic undertaking, such as how it's radically underfunded and built on lies intended to cheat basically all of his partners. Thus is Korda obliged to trot the globe and make amends with and/or re-swindle all the people he's already burned, which might have to include his half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who might be one of the main powers trying to murder him; and so he abandons his large number of young sons, obviously not for the first time, and converts their (and his) random-facts tutor, entomologist hyper-nerd Bjorn (Michael Cera), into his new personal secretary, and confronts his colleagues each in turn (a sea of Anderson repertory players willing to work for scale, notably Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, and Scarlett Johansson, whereas I believe Riz Ahmed is actually new). However, Korda's most recent brush with death—the closest he's ever sustained until he has an even closer one about halfway through the film—has prompted him to contemplate his mortality and legacy, and for this purpose he has summoned his first and eldest child, his only daughter Liesel (Mia Threapleton), pulling her out of the convent where she's a novitiate waiting to take her vows to accompany him on his mission while, "on a trial basis," determining if she is the one to serve as his sole heir.
This is, you'll have noticed, bound to be pretty episodic, but it's almost disorientingly straightforward structurally for an Anderson film in 2025, even devoid of any particularly noticeable framing device (it has a little bit of outside-the-story framing to tie things up at the end but by Anderson standards might as well have none), and that's not actually what I was asking for when I might've wished that Asteroid City were more straightforward, since much of the pleasure of Anderson movies is bound up in gonzo structural flourish. The closest we have, and I suppose in another person's movie it would count as a noticeable framing device, are the phantasmal black-and-white afterlife sequences that begin with Korda's first inconclusive dance with death, and continue to plague him afterwards (both as a matter of nightmare and as a matter of new confrontations with potentially-mortal injuries), which together with Liesel's semi-devout Catholicism* would like you to consider this to be Wes Anderson's movie "about religion," which he sort of already did with his Close Encounters metaphor ("for what?"/"I don't know") back in Asteroid City, and where there was inevitably a bit more force to it even when it was avowedly confused about it, because Anderson's religion is in fact his idiosyncratic pursuit of truth and beauty through the mysterious phoniness of art, and not, certainly so far as has been communicated in his movies including in this one, his native lapsed Episcopalianism.
Meanwhile, the heart of story, you'll also have noticed, is probably going to be how Korda the con-man reconnects with his estranged, and strange, adult child, so not even that reductively we're finding Anderson re-running The Royal Tenenbaums to no small degree, but pared down to just that relationship and one kid. (So... The Life Aquatic.) I don't have any special problem with Anderson doing a variation on a theme (obviously), and this is what I would've been asking for if I'd asked for something more straightforward from this filmmaker, but I really don't know if he actually nails it here: this is a hugely delightful adventure comedy done in Anderson's "please, have a hand grenade" register, possibly to the point it overrode the other thing we're after in an Anderson, the deep and abiding undercurrent of melancholy and lost time, so that despite those being "there" they aren't given the moments where they unexpectedly surface to snatch your heart out of your chest; we get the resolution we want out of an Anderson movie, perhaps that Anderson's spouse would have liked (I would not dare presume to speak to her actual relationship with her dad), but it's a little, I hate to tell you this, perfunctory in its emotions, in that at the end you comprehend the story of fathers and daughters that's just been told but don't necessarily feel it, which isn't even the case in Asteroid City if you accept that the emotions are coming from Anderson himself entirely outside of the story he's telling. Or maybe this is altogether down to Threapleton—though I do think Del Toro is tilting his performance (or having it tilted) towards breezy, surfacey comedy, and away from serious feeling, which is an unwelcome surprise considering that, give or take Wright, he was responsible for the most moving aspects of The French Dispatch—but in any event I think Threapleton does give us a very useful case study for what actually separates "a good Wes Anderson movie performance" from "standing or sitting there and delivering arch dialogue in stiff, mannered fashion," particularly up against Cera, also new to Anderson's stable, who plainly understands what "a good Wes Anderson movie performance" entails and layers an enormous amount of quiet misery and yearning beneath a character that's otherwise just a combination of cartoon accent, cartoon enthusiasm for the subject of his erudition, and cartoon thriller movie duplicity.
But it is a delightful adventure comedy, and—other than the increasingly noticeable absence of the places, as would be more usual in an Anderson movie, where you kind of feel like crying because of the secret soul revealed, which only becomes "a problem" in the last several minutes—I don't know if thirty seconds went by when I wasn't being delighted. It is, I've found, always pretty delightful to watch Anderson contort his style towards "thriller," with the slight sensation of watching children armed with toys and pretending to be in deadly danger inside a carboard fort, but with the honed sensibilities of Anderson and his editor Barney Pilling ensuring that it feels like something you can meet halfway. Hence the frequent airborne perils (and subsequent plane crashes) are all pretty fantastic pieces of "action cinema" rendered comedy by the fact that we're watching obvious sets, obvious models, and unfinessed digital compositing, and gain some sort of woozy, funny heft from the genuinely outstanding thriller cues that Alexandre Desplat's deploying for his score; this is despite the fact that Anderson is not going to ever show you a plane actually crashing, because he understands the limitations of his visuals. Likewise, every single one of the weirdos Korda encounters as he winds his way through his Canaanite plot is a worthy little sketch. I'm particularly taken with Amalric furiously demanding of Ayoade's revolutionary what purpose his henchmen shooting at his chandelier serves when everybody's already agreed to be robbed to fund the litany of socially-beneficial programs he's mentioned his Marxist paramilitary organization has established; and Wright's reaction to an unpinned grenade is wonderful; but even something as dumb-sounding as Hanks and Cranston's characters vying against Korda by way of trick basketball shots is pretty funny. It even escalates quite well: I'm not sure the corpse of Korda's first secretary, witnessed in the first 60 seconds of the film, is not its single funniest joke, but the physical comedy of the final "epic" confrontation with Nubar, ornamented with a splendid slow-motion gag that I wouldn't even think about spoiling, is surely in the running there. (Cera is, in case I wasn't clear, also very funny; and at the comedy part of his arrogant, malignant character, Del Toro is absolutely aces too. "I don't need my human rights" is a fucking amazing delivery of Anderson's gentle edgelording.) It's a disappointment, but a disappointment because I still expect flat-out masterpieces from Anderson and I will continue to do so; but if he never made another one, and all we ever got the whole rest of our lives was larks as fun as The Phoenician Scheme, I could not be mad about it.
Score: 8/10
*Just as a random guess I'm gonna say the Fouads are of Marionite extraction.
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