THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME ***1/2
Wes Anderson2025
IDEA: Hunted and sabotaged by his adversaries, a wealthy business tycoon embarks on a quest with his appointed heir - his only daughter - to convince his associates to fund his newest and biggest project.
BLURB: The title sequence of The Phoenician Scheme — a long-take, slow-motion overhead shot of a monochromatic and sparsely furnished bathroom — heralds a simpler Wes Anderson than we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade-plus. The ensuing film has few of his most extravagant (and irritating) formal indulgences: no meta framing device or laborious stories within stories, no chaotic profusions of onscreen text, no constant shifting between aspect ratios and time periods, and not as many elaborate camera movements or overstuffed images. There’s still a sprawling cast of characters, but the narrative is focalized around just two (maybe three) of them, harkening back to the more intimate emotional worlds of Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. At its core, The Phoenician Scheme is the story of an amoral megalomaniac finding spiritual redemption by reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This is old ground for Anderson, and arguably exhausted by this point, but the situational detail, humor, and pathos he brings to the characterizations of Zsa-Zsa Korda and Liesl are so finely realized it feels like a cleansing distillation rather than a retread. Benicio del Toro cuts a magnetic figure as a worldly grandiose scoundrel, and Mia Threapleton is a mordant delight as the vexed novitiate daughter who grudgingly comes along on her father’s mission. Biblical allusions, transcultural mischief, and cinematic inter-texts abound (hello, A Matter of Life and Death!), but the film moves with a streamlined linearity that never loses sight of the relationship at its center. The Phoenician Scheme wraps that affecting parent-child rapprochement in a witty fairytale adventure that also has something to say about the abuse of power in a global capitalist world (shades of a certain U.S. president-turned-felon are unmissable). Maybe a person like Korda being humbled is a fantasy in real life, but in Anderson’s malleable and merciful alternate universe, it’s blessedly achievable.
