In the Flesh: The Phoenician Scheme

The Phoenician Scheme is a lesser Wes Anderson almost from its first moments, in which flat line readings and hurried pacing grate against the cartoonish tone of an airplane crash sequence. Benicio del Toro makes the most of his relatively thin role as arms dealer and international facilitator Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda, but he can’t make unscrupulous roguishness work with the severely limited emotional palette available to him under Anderson’s direction. The result never rises above the level of enjoyable, and neither Mia Threapleton as his estranged daughter, Liesl, nor Michael Cera as entomologist, tutor, and CIA asset Bjørn Lund manage to push the needle much further. In previous films Anderson managed to puncture his own affectations by inserting outbursts of raw emotion — Ralph Fiennes flying into a fit of rage aboard the train in Grand Budapest Hotel, Gene Hackman yelling and mugging in The Royal Tenenbaums — but The Phoenician Scheme offers little such tonal contrast, and is weaker for it.

Still, there is pleasure to be had in fussiness and artifice. The elegant technical perfection of the bathroom scene, shot entirely from overhead like something between a particularly beautiful page in an Eye Spy publication and a synchronized swimming routine, is on an aesthetic level as good as anything Anderson has ever made. The black and white dream sequence in which a bearded Zsa Zsa carries a dead stag to an altar before his three wives and cuts it open with his daughter’s knife, only for gold coins to spill out in a shimmering cascade, feels less like an homage to Bergman than a near perfect recreation of what made his visions of mysticism and symbolic images so lasting and powerful. The Korda palazzo is represented by an exquisite series of sets and locations, though the Egyptian-inspired hotel in which the final act takes place feels uninspired by comparison, even if there is some thematic underpinning to the choice.

The film’s plot is present mostly to keep our three lead characters together, but there’s precious little to their dynamic. Threapleton’s character in particular seldom rises above the level of beautiful cipher. The cast of Anderson’s usual stable appear and disappear without leaving much of an impression, with even stalwarts like Jeffrey Wright falling short of their usual excellence. The climactic fight between Zsa Zsa and his half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) is too restrained to feel consequential. At his best, Anderson creates worlds in which layers of intentionally obvious artifice can sometimes build up into a kind of truth, or else be ripped away to show something vulnerable and beautiful, but at his worst he amounts to little more than a curator of beautiful, sterile dollhouses. There’s only a little of the former in The Phoenician Scheme, and far too much of the latter.