‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review: Wes Anderson’s Self-Reflexive Triumph
Wes Anderson culminates his cycle of self-reflexion with The Phoenician Scheme, a film that throws all of his formal sensibilities out the window, as he looks to break what made him such a revered filmmaker for the past thirty years.
One of the most tired phrases in all of film criticism is “you know what you’re going to get” when referring to a specific filmmaker’s style, and “it did what it set out to do” when that specific person accomplishes a movie with their defined conventions we’ve come to expect from them. The one in which we can associate these sentences to the most is Wes Anderson, who has developed a decidedly singular style that audiences essentially know what type of movie they will get as soon as they buy a ticket for his latest project: symmetrical cinematography, production design that illustrates the artificiality of the world the characters inhabit, deadpan humor, aspect ratio and color changes, and, most importantly, a whimsical score from Alexandre Desplat that accompanies his witty adventures.
You know you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie when all of those elements are found in the production. And, despite the filmmaker having become more serious in his recent works, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and the disappointing The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, his hallmarks are still very present. No one can replicate Anderson but the man himself, because he’s the only one who fundamentally understands his style and the way he constantly reshapes it to fit with the narratives he wants to tell.
However, and in recent memory, audiences have begun to develop “Wes Anderson fatigue,” thinking the American filmmaker always does the same thing (not true) with the idiosyncrasies he’s developed for almost thirty years. I’ll agree that his recent projects have started to feel a tad redundant (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar being the biggest culprit of the three), but never to entirely sink his projects. As a result, his latest movie, The Phoenician Scheme, has received the most polarizing reviews of his career, with some calling it a flat-out masterpiece, while others are perplexed at his lack of focus in its plotting and character development.
As a die-hard Wes Andersoner (if this term exists), what if I told you that the “plot,” which is utter nonsense, by the way, is the least important thing of The Phoenician Scheme, and perhaps the sole element all of us need to pay attention to the least? Shocking, I know, but what’s most fascinating about this object is how Anderson, through the figure of Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), thinks about his stylistic conventions and decides to break every single one of them in this 105-minute darkly funny affair, almost as if he’s fatigued himself that this is how he’s made movies since his directorial debut in 1996.
Right from the top, Anderson, with the aid of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and production designer Adam Stockhausen, stages the most violent sequence of his career, where Zsa-Zsa’s plane gets blown up by unnamed forces who have now attempted to assassinate him six times. One body gets blown up in half, while the other, a pilot, gets ejected in the most burlesque fashion, before Anderson abruptly cuts to Heaven, where Zsa-Zsa is confronted by visions of his own past – and future – through spiritual figures, played by Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, and Bill Murray.
It’s at that specific point where Anderson flips everything we know about him, up to this point, and begins to formally shift the way he perceives himself and his movies, almost as if he feels that his creative mind doesn’t have the same spark of wonder he once had. The stark black-and-white gets desaturated in flashes, as Zsa-Zsa experiences a quasi-spiritual epiphany, before Anderson cuts back to the land of the living, and presents us with its opening credits in total slow-motion, something he hasn’t employed the way he does before.
More flashes of color occur, and we then move to a half-baked plot where Zsa-Zsa, fearing an attempt on his life will be made again, attempts to convince his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) to become his sole heir, and solidify a deal to fix the price of critical materials, which he dubs as “The Gap.” With Liesl and tutor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), Zsa-Zsa travels around the world to fix the price of The Gap by exchanging with multiple figures, including Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), brothers Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), nightclub owner Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), sailor Marty (Jeffrey Wright), cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), and uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Again, the plot is complete nonsense. What’s most important throughout this globetrotting caper is how Anderson rethinks his filmmaking sensibilities for the first time in his career. The minute, almost mathematical symmetry he’s known for is suddenly imperfect, as if he believes this quest for heightened perfection may no longer be attainable. The slow-motion is languishing, and forces us to sit through sequences of raw spiritual poetry, at a level where the filmmaker seemed afraid to explore until today. Most surprisingly, the violence is gratuitous, and as comedically staged as it may be, it feels genuinely shocking.
When Anderson eventually stages the confrontation between Zsa-Zsa and Nubar, with Cumberbatch in a devilishly exaggerated beard recalling Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin, everything we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker in terms of action choreography gets thrown out the window. The cuts from editor Barney Pilling are incredibly quick, as Anderson stages what is essentially a shot/reverse shot duel between two dutch tilts before they go after one another, culminating in a Godzilla-esque destruction of a miniature, an artifice at the forefront of each Anderson picture.
It’s absurdly maximalist as it is formally inventive for a filmmaker who has never (and I mean never) been imprecise, even when crafting chase sequences in movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson has always been symmetrical, methodical, and as exact as he possibly can, but he’s only human and has finally started to show signs of exhaustion as he begins to wonder if this is all that his movies could be.
The cracks in his aesthetics start to show, and the movie becomes far more engrossing as a result. There’s a difference between “messy” from a screenwriting perspective, where the plot doesn’t make a shred of sense, and the film is completely devoid of anything interesting, and “messy” in how the filmmaker thinks about his conception of cinema and lays it all on the screen, ruminating on whether or not what he’s doing will help him better understand the artform and, most importantly, himself.
It may be why his last few efforts have openly discussed the spectre of death (“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” can have many distinct points of significance when relating it to life – or the ultimate trip one takes – in Asteroid City), but none so like in The Phoenician Scheme. Not only do we get sequences where Zsa-Zsa directly confronts God himself, and the most regretful moments of his life (as illustrated in a cameo from Charlotte Gainsbourg), but actual moments where the protagonist’s life flashes back before his eyes, signaling that his end his near. Knowing that he’s survived that many assassination attempts, perhaps it’s not it for Zsa-Zsa, but he knows it’s coming close, and it’ll arrive much sooner than later.
As a result, Benicio del Toro plays the deadpan character with an air of melancholy that makes his saddest moments stand out like a sore thumb and ensures we’re aware of Zsa-Zsa’s imperfections more than his quirks, such as deception and kindly offering grenades to everyone he meets. Del Toro worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, but is now stepping up to play the lead role in a character tailor-made for him. He’s both mordantly funny and profoundly human, especially when death stares at him in the face, and he has no choice but to accept it, regardless of God’s will.
But the best performance of the entire assembly of star-studded actors who consistently enjoy playing with Wes’ theatrics is obviously Michael Cera, who, for the first time, collaborates with a director whose style is a match made in heaven with the actor’s known comedic skills. Not only does he completely understand the assignment and enjoys playing an eccentric character in a world full of eccentric characters, but he likely gives the best performance of his career. From how Delbonnel staggeringly blocks him in the frame (each detail gives tons of comedic texture to the environments Anderson presents) to his quick range as he shifts from one extreme to the next, Cera is a pure riot and will hopefully now be Anderson’s secret weapon as he has now discovered the cinematic equivalent of fire.
It becomes hard to dislike The Phoenician Scheme, as nonsensical as the plot may be, when Anderson seems to be at his most open, as he begins to question what cinema means to him and what he values the most in this life. It’s the complete antithesis to everything the filmmaker has done, as he breaks all of his formal conventions and tries to make a complete mess out of himself, aesthetically, thematically, and narratively. That may be why some think the plot is “jumbled,” but, as I said in the earlier paragraphs of this review, it doesn’t matter. Observing the cineaste tell the audience, “Hey, maybe repeating myself isn’t such a good idea after all” and proceeds to do the exact opposite of what “we know we’re going to get” is what’s most inspiring about this movie that purposefully does not do “what it set out to do.”