'The Phoenician Scheme': Morality, Capitalism, and Hand Grenades
Wes Anderson's latest attempts to wrestle with moral costs, but lacks an emotional core.
Casual observers may feel that all of Wes Anderson’s movies are the same, but such a superficial reading misses how his distinctive style is a lens for different kinds of stories. Broadly speaking, his films from 1996-2007 are interpersonal dramas with Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited1 all revolving around “bad dads” of a sort and the tension between fathers and sons. 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox represents a turning point of sorts, and while Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is still an immature father figure who has to grow up, there’s more texture and development in the surrounding relationships.
The second half of Anderson’s filmography is where you can see him cast his vision beyond father-son tensions and look at the larger world, ranging from young love in Moonrise Kingdom to the rise of fascism in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson took his knack for telling smaller, intimate stories and then placed them in a larger backdrop about our current tensions. Sometimes that works beautifully like in 2023’s Asteroid City, which examines the need for art in times of great isolation, and othertimes you get The Phoenician Scheme, which still retains Anderson’s signature humor and style, but feels far more muddled and aloof as it ponders if anyone can remain moral when they’re bound up in the sociopathic nature of capitalism.
Benicio del Toro stars as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a ruthless industrialist, scourge of governments the world over, and frequent target of assassinations by his competitors. After the latest assassination attempt almost kills him, he decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a young woman in a novitiate who wants nothing to do with a man so heartless he thinks nothing of using slave labor or inciting famines if it will help him achieve his goals. Still, she sees an opportunity to at least lessen his damage, and more importantly, by going along with his latest venture, discover who killed her mother. When the government manipulates the price of building materials to try and stop Zsa-Zsa, he, Liesl, and Zsa-Zsa’s entomology-tutor-cum-personal-assistant Bjorn (Michael Cera) go across Phoenicia to renegotiate contracts and cover the project’s shortfall. These misadventures tend to result in Zsa-Zsa having more near-death experiences where he witnesses an Ingmar Bergman-like afterlife judging him for his actions.
I can’t deny that The Phoenician Scheme is as fun and flighty as anything Anderson has ever done. He’s truly off in his own world, and to see what amounts to an action-thriller in his peculiar mold is a unique experience. On some level, we’re still seeing the oddly charming productions of Max Fischer’s (Jason Schwartzman) stage plays from Rushmore, where we’re seeing serious material rendered as cute and offbeat. But for Anderson, this approach continues to work and make The Phoenician Scheme play like nothing else out there, despite its resemblance to Anderson’s past works.
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