Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God.
Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential audience have had enough of the tableaux vivants and the mid-century-modern sets and candy colours, the endless digressing, and films that seem longer than they actually are (The French Dispatch and Asteroid City were both only about 1 hour 45 minutes, but felt longer). But fear not, The Phoenician Scheme has pace, it has jokes and it has Mia Threapleton in a lead role. And rather than hiding the fact that she’s Kate Winslet’s daughter, Threapleton embraces the fact. Her entire performance is done in her mum’s starchy-exasperated-matron style. It’s one of the big reasons to watch.
Another is Benicio Del Toro, playing Zsa-Zsa Korda (a nod to two if not three Hungarian movie somebodies there), a 20th-century version of a tech-bro blowhard, who pulls his daughter Liesl (Threapleton) out of the convent where she’s been raised, rewrites his will to make her his sole heir and sets about travelling the world with her in an attempt to “cover the gap” in his failing businesses – bilk the investors to save the megacorp.
The plot is not even a tissue of a McGuffin, and Anderson has a couple more, also inconsequential, in case that’s one isn’t absorbent enough for you. In place of a storyline, he gives us a tasting menu of wackadoodle star turns. As we meet the potential stiffees, Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks turn up playing basketball on an unfinished railway line. Mathieu Amalric ducks a bullet in a nightclub. Jeffrey Wright escapes a suicide bombing. Scarlett Johansson is lined up as a new wife for Korda – this cousin has money! Benedict Cumberbatch plays the estranged half brother. And on it goes.
Along for the ride with Korda and Liesl is Michael Cera as Bjorn, some sort of tutor and factotum. Funny. Meanwhile, the likes of Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Karl Markovics, Richard Ayoade, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Riz Ahmed, Donald Sumpter and F Murray Abraham take their places in “wasn’t that?” roles. A great film for spot-the-face bingo.
Del Toro himself is a blizzard of brilliance, a non-stop energy animating his performance. Korda is insanely verbose – he has logorrhoea, he’s a sesquipedalian, if you will (I’ll put the thesaurus away now) – and Del Toro makes him not just annoying but very funny.
Every frame of it – shot on film (so it literally is frames) by the great cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel – is art directed to an insane degree. It is tiring but not tiresome, which it sometimes can be in an Anderson film. The magic ingredient is heart. There is a gentleness beneath the madness. Anderson has loosened up a touch, as if he is trying to peek out from behind the whimsy and make a film that isn’t all effect.
And there is a point being made. Though Del Toro’s mad maverick eccentric Korda is vastly entertaining to watch, he’s not a nice man. The super-rich are not like the rest of us, the implication is, they lack the milk of human kindness and once up there at the top of their tree, they will do anything to stay there, including eating their own young.
This is not a film to convince the doubters. If you’ve always hated Anderson’s relentless feyness, this isn’t going to turn you. But if some of his films have tickled you (The Grand Budapest Hotel, maybe, or Moonrise Kingdom or, going way back, Rushmore or Bottle Rocket) this is a reminder that that version of Anderson is still out there.
The Phoenician Scheme – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
