The Phoenician Scheme Misses the Big Picture

Wes Anderson’s films are peppered with charismatic absentee parents: Gene Hackman bluffing his way back into his family’s lives for free housing in The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Murray gladly using the inheritance of the maybe-son he’s just met to finance his next documentary in The Life Aquatic, Anjelica Huston fleeing her husband and children for the Himalayas in The Darjeeling Limited. But when it comes to providing fodder for therapy, none holds a candle to Zsa-zsa Korda, the international businessman played by Benicio del Toro in The Phoenician Scheme. Korda is one of the men who pulls the strings of the world — stateless, amoral, and devoted to the acquisition of capital like it’s the leaderboard of life. He’s been married three times and keeps nine sons, some adopted, in a dorm like they’re spare parts he might someday need. His sole daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), was dumped in a convent at a young age. She’s well on her way to becoming a nun until Korda, after surviving the latest of many attempts on his life, decides to give her a test run as his heir — despite her vocation and the fact that he hasn’t seen her in six years. He brings her in on his latest project, an audaciously ambitious series of infrastructure deals that he sees as his legacy, as well as a way to ensure wealth for generations. Liesl really only wants to know if he, as rumored, murdered her mother. If not, she’d like revenge on whoever did.

The swashbuckling sire, the deadpan ingénue, the sans serif font, the one-point perspective — Anderson’s held fast to his favorite elements even as his canvases have gotten broader and his style even more fastidious. But, as was the case with The Grand Budapest Hotel and Asteroid City, which have been some of the most acclaimed films of his career, The Phoenician Scheme left me feeling like he’s broadening rather than growing as an artist, trading the emotional core that has always given his work tangibility for grander ideas. This film, set in 1956, hops between the Palazzo Korda, its protagonist’s cavernous mansion, and different quarters of Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, a vague Middle Eastern nation that’s depicted as an array of deserts, warring factions, and colonial outposts. It bounces along to the drumbeat of a thriller as Korda tries to coerce, extort, and charm extra funding out of his partners in each area to save his project while evading assassination attempts (his refrain of “Myself, I feel very safe” is less declaration than mantra). But its flurry of mid-century design and rapid-fire exchanges feels like layers of painstakingly applied lacquer over human figures left barely visible by the process. It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole.

The problem is that the stakes of its parent-child rapprochement are higher than they’ve ever been in an Anderson film and higher than can be reasonably pulled off by anyone. The Phoenician Scheme hangs no less than world progress onto the inevitable redemption of its anti-hero, which is helped along by the black-and-white visions he starts having of being judged in the afterlife. Korda, whom del Toro wisely approaches with gruffness rather than any overt intent to charm, isn’t just a bad dad but someone who exists at such a metaphorically high altitude that he doesn’t perceive obvious rights and wrongs. Liesl, played tartly by Threapleton in a role that’s still as much about the costuming as the character, has to point out that his plan to use slave labor is a moral abomination, as is his destabilizing the region with famine. If Anderson had any inclination to link his work to the present day, you could draw a line to various current oligarchs through Korda’s interest in fatherhood as a numbers game, or the way he spends his downtime on lessons from a tutor named Bjorn (Michael Cera, delightful), who’s hired to serve as a ’50s answer to an informational podcast. But Korda isn’t a critique of power — he’s just another one of the raffish swashbucklers Anderson finds so irresistible, those men who’ll come around to the right thing eventually, and in the meantime have to be admired for the panache with which they live life.

This particular character just happens to come from a line of people who are willing to commit war crimes when necessary for profit, a fact that is left an abstraction because, even as it hops the globe, The Phoenician Scheme is still a family drama at heart. Anderson’s never been able to treat political zeal as more than another personality quirk — the film’s own jungle-dwelling radicals, led by Sergio (Richard Ayoade), might as well be the Max Fischer Players for how seriously their motivations are taken. But having Korda’s turn toward the better hinge on the daughter he never knew he needed feels woefully inadequate in light of the context in which he exists, where widespread offscreen suffering is just another business gambit. After a terse exchange of barked words and blood with one of his business partners, the man, played by Jeffrey Wright, decides to give Korda an injection of cash “just to watch [him] conduct the grand finale.” It’s a sentiment The Phoenician Scheme clearly expects us to understand — that no one does it like Korda, and that, for all of his flaws, you have to hand it to him. But it’s not one the film actually sells you on. Keep your eyes on the granular details — the Champagne in an ice-filled bidet in Korda’s bathroom, the multiple plane-crash tableaux, the shoebox of family history — because the big picture is lacking.