Filmmaker Wes Anderson’s (Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, Moonrise Kingdom) latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, a typically brilliant period satire, centers on the mid-20th-century embodiment of corrupt, late-stage capitalism, an unscrupulous, megalomaniacal titan of industry (aka, an oligarch), Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), as he faces all manner of existential, personal, and professional crises, up to and including multiple attempts on his life by assassins known and unknown, an uncertain, fraught relationship with his daughter, Liesl (standout Mia Threapleton), and the potential failure of his life’s work, a massive infrastructure project long on egomaniacal ambition and potentially short on the necessary funds.
The Phoenician Scheme opens on a predictably comic note, with Korda’s near-demise as his private airplane suffers an emergency decompression followed by a rapid unscheduled disassembly courtesy of a well-placed bomb. Korda’s unnamed assistant doesn’t survive, but Korda and his pilot (Stephen Park) do, the latter via parachute moments after his unceremonious firing. In unmistakably Andersonian fashion, an on-the-spot news crew assumes Korda didn’t survive the airplane’s crash in a cornfield. An out-of-frame Korda, gingerly holding what he drolly describes as an errant “vestigial organ,” strides into view, definitely worse for wear, but even more eager to conquer what’s left of the mid-20th-century world.
Except, maybe not, at least not in Korda’s complicated case. Between the annoyances, setbacks, and obstacles associated with repeated attempts on his life and frequent forays into a medieval black-and-white dream world where the Powers-That-Be have put Korda’s immortal soul on trial for a multitude of venal and mortal sins, Korda begins an essential, introspective journey, reflecting on his failings and failures as a parent to Liesl, a novitiate nun in the Roman Catholic Church weeks away from taking her final vows. In Korda’s eyes, she’s a paragon of virtue — and not just virtue-signaling — in a fallen world, and thus his exact opposite in every way. Liesl represents a rare second chance for a man who seemingly has everything (e.g., wealth, power, influence), but who starts to question the relentless, unyielding capitalistic ethos that’s defined his life until now.
Like practically every captain or titan of industry before him (fictional or otherwise), Korda has constructed his life around amassing wealth, palatial estates in far-flung countries, and classical European art. But even that’s not enough for Korda. He wants to be remembered long after he’s departed this mortal plane for the next. Korda wants to build a gargantuan monument to match his equally gargantuan ego, the kind of monument monarchs and dictators tend to build for — and to — themselves: A project so massive, so mammoth, and thus, undeniably memorable well beyond the capacity for Korda to fund himself; in turn creating a potentially ruinous “Gap.” Filling that gap drives The Phoenician Scheme’s otherwise episodic, cameo-rich plot set in various corners and quadrants of the fractious, fictionalized, Middle Eastern-inspired nation-state of Phoenicia.
Increasingly mindful of his impending mortality, Korda makes Liesl his sole heir (his 9 sons, some adopted, some biological, get yearly stipends, apparently) and the provisional executor of his affairs if an assassin’s bullet finds him before he completes his life’s work. She understandably balks, preferring the pious, unadorned life of a nun to the far more complicated, materially focused life of a capitalistic entrepreneur. That, in turn, sets in motion, The Phoenician Scheme’s central conflict and through-line: Korda’s gradual humanization, not to mention evolution into a human being no longer obsessed with material acquisition or social status, through his interactions with the steadfast, loyal Liesl, and his newly hired administrative assistant and tutor, Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera).
The various in-film stops essential to filling in the funding “gap” allow Anderson, a singular auteurist without parallel, to indulge his usual playfulness (aka whimsy, a dirty word to some, the opposite to others) in settings, tone, and humor. The first interlude involves a pick-up game of basketball inside a train tunnel, the second at a Moroccan-inspired nightclub, the third aboard a steamer, the fourth in the proximity of a dam construction, and the last at a cheekily garish, Egyptian-themed hotel where the various characters, subplots, and themes happily devolve into physical comedy and a literally farcical explosion to the proceedings and the central, overarching storyline.
It’s all, of course, eminently satisfying, pleasing, and ultimately entertaining as only Anderson’s films can be, benefitting from Anderson’s signature visual style (centered compositions, traveling or tracking shots, etc.), Bruno Delbonnel’s picture-perfect cinematography, Adam Stockhausen’s geometrically oriented production design, and Milena Canonero’s impeccably tailored, complementary costumes, and an earworm-worthy score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat.
As with most of Anderson’s decades-spanning filmography, artifice reigns supreme in The Phoenician Scheme. Not just the usual, mostly invisible artifice typical of traditional, realist filmmaking, but on artifice front and center, first and foremost, both for the aesthetic pleasures surface-level artifice provides and for its seamless merging with theme, story, and character until Andersonian authenticity, emotional more than narrative, emerges: Once examined through The Phoenician Scheme‘s fanciful permutations, Korda’s life becomes all the more worth living.
The Phoenician Scheme opens theatrically on Friday, June 6th, via Focus Features.
