Set in the 1940s, The Phoenician Scheme is an espionage black comedy centered on Zsa-zsa Korda, a wealthy arms dealer who unexpectedly names his daughter Liesl—a novice nun yet to take her vows—as heir to his empire. Accompanied by her father’s quirky tutor, Bjorn Lund, Liesl is drawn into a globe-trotting mission to secure her father’s latest and most enigmatic venture. As they cross Europe and a volatile Middle Eastern state, the trio is ensnared in a web of deceit, danger, and shifting allegiances within the morally murky world of their family business.

The Phoenician Scheme Review

Known for his distinctive style, director Wes Anderson has made a career of exploring the dysfunctions of family life. Films like The Royal Tenenbaums and the Academy Award-winning Fantastic Mr. Fox turn family dramedy on its head and deliver sincere and thoughtful tales despite their unconventionality.

Oftentimes, Anderson films provide a refreshing departure from the commercials for future assembly-line products posing as movies that we’ve been subjected to for the better part of two decades. The Phoenician Scheme is not one of those times.

True to form, The Phoenician Scheme is packed with Wes Anderson film alum. Benecio Del Toro leads a group that includes Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe (who never met an expressionism project he didn’t like), Bill Murray, and more, as well as Anderson newcomers Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera. Del Toro and crew deliver their best.

Unfortunately, any emotional weight that the film might have intended to foster (and it does intend it) is swallowed up by The Phoenician Scheme’s steroidal dollhouse aesthetic and performances of such polished and overstylized dry irony that no quantity of vermouth could moisten them. Arguably, more than in Anderson’s previous films, this leaves the actors as little more than well-paid props and the audience disconnected from a substantively deep narrative, made to feel shallow (a common criticism of the filmmaker).

Like many of his previous films, Anderson masterfully crafts a dioramic fictional reality that feels alive and textural in spite of being quite askew of actual reality, and his offbeat characters, as akimbo as the rest of the world, slide into place like fine German engineering.

Visually, The Phoenician Scheme may be Anderson’s magnum opus. Undoubtedly, set designer Josef Brandl (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and the rest of the design team will find themselves in contention for the Academy Award. Wes’s partiality to models and practical effects is a welcome change from the green screen and StageCraft digitally infecting most films today. In fact, the film is so visually stunning and creative that one could almost watch it as a one-hour and forty-one-minute art show.

Symbiotically threaded throughout the visuals, Wes’s penchant for symbolism is at an all-time high, and fans of his style will need multiple viewings to pick through the dense detail (I smell a college freshman seminar at NYU on the horizon). Whether or not there’s much of any significant meaning to be found is debatable.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of the film will depend entirely on your appreciation of Anderson’s style because The Phoenician Scheme is all style with only sketched character development and a plot you’ll forget before you finish your popcorn.

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