The Phoenician Scheme

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.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Papa, Can You Hear Me

• It wouldn’t be a Wes Anderson film without daddy issues. However, though they are central to the story, they are also positively resolved. More than that, Anderson never seems sanctimonious about them. Rather, he seems to be working through something personal, and we get to view it through his unique lens. This is to say that I didn’t mark down the Woke-O-Meter for it.

Can Wes Anderson Create A Metaphor So Contradictory He Can’t Lift It?

• Religion plays a key thematic role in the film, as Del Toro’s character suffers through a multitude of visions of himself being judged by a Heavenly court. His daughter (and the film’s co-star) also begins the movie as a proto-nun on the cusp of taking her vows. Furthermore, prayer is shown as both personally healthy and practically applicable. However, there are a number of moments that seem to suggest that Christianity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
  • On multiple occasions, a character asks a Christian authority figure a non-sequitur about whether or not God supports slavery in the bible.
    • In one of these instances, Del Toro tempts the Lord Our God directly as he slides in the question while being judged—you know, blasphemy.
  • The proto-nun says that she is unsure whether being chaste outside of marriage or even inside the habit is important.
  • The nun agrees with another character that religion is a “sign of the oppressed.”
  • A character asks the woman, only days away from taking the veil, if God cares more about his money or his soul, and she is genuinely stumped.
  • Spoiler

    The nun ends the film as a chainsmoking waitress in a romantic relationship, and the film’s tone suggests that she’s far more contented in this secular role.

The Root of All Evil

• The film’s primary message is that you’ll find much more happiness in familial connections over material wealth, and while that’s an axiom that many of us (myself included) hold as accurate, the film takes it to the extreme with every wealthy business owner represented negatively, except for…

Good Girls

• There’s not a mortal man in the movie who is painted in a positive light. In fact, the only female tycoon is the only wealthy elite who turns down Del Toro’s character’s dubious offer and shows selflessness and charity with her money.