Is “The Phoenician Scheme” Wes Anderson’s Most Emotional Film?

Wes Anderson’s new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is a funny-ha-ha comedy, but there’s nothing funny about its story, which involves a wealthy industrialist’s attempts to realize a grandiose infrastructure project. Anderson’s signature is instantly recognizable in the movie’s decorative production design, its frontal and symmetrical framings, and its antic, densely plotted story—and equally in the fact that it is a violent and death-haunted action film, filled with fights and chases. Yet, compared with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) and the work that has followed, the new film is relatively simple: rather than nesting stories within other stories, it follows its protagonist closely. The result is a heightened clarity—revealing the distinctive world view that Anderson’s methods embody—and an unusually direct emotionalism.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is the story of an amusingly bad man who becomes a little less amusing and a little less bad. Benicio del Toro, alternately glowering and glib, stars as Anatole (Zsa-zsa) Korda, an Onassis-like figure of uninhibited ruthlessness. The action, which runs from 1950 to late 1951, begins as Zsa-zsa, a proud citizen of no country, flits about in a private Air Korda plane that he knows to be a target of saboteurs. Sure enough, mid-flight, a hole is blown in the fuselage, and Zsa-zsa, taking the controls, crash-lands the plane. Unconscious, he has a near-death experience—filmed in black-and-white with a sense of both comedy and wonderment—in which he arrives in a cotton-puff Heaven under the severe scrutiny of a berobed gatekeeper (played by Willem Dafoe).

Badly wounded, Zsa-zsa recuperates in his sixteenth-century Italian palazzo, and summons his twenty-year-old daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun. She’s the eldest of his ten children (the other nine are boys), and he wants her to renounce her vocation and become the heir to his enterprises, at a critical moment. A grand project in the fictitious country of Phoenicia, thirty years in the making—involving a canal, a tunnel, a railroad line, and a dam—may finally be coming to fruition, and Zsa-zsa, who is set to get five per cent of the profits, will stop at nothing to realize it. The film sardonically conjures a golden age of interventionist arrogance. Though there’s no explicit mention of the Cold War, there’s plenty of espionage and intrigue. Zsa-zsa’s many enemies include American secret agents, an international business consortium, and a well-armed band of revolutionaries, led by a man named Sergio (Richard Ayoade). Zsa-zsa’s scheme comes at a high human cost: it may bring modernization to Phoenicia, but it will depend on slave labor. This doesn’t trouble his conscience any more than does his reputation for financial misdeeds. But the scheme puts several targets on his back: governments and corporate entities see him as a loose cannon, and the revolutionaries see him as a predator.

It’s no wonder that Zsa-zsa is accustomed to assassination attempts. At meals, he puts a drop of reagent into his drinks, and he is unruffled when one turns out to be poisoned. He is at home with violence, literally: he keeps a box full of hand grenades nearby at all times and offers them to guests as if they were cigars or chocolates. He endures danger, such as a submersion in quicksand, with gruff equanimity. He also keeps his cool in heated dealings with a far-flung cast of associates whose backing he needs: with Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), he faces two Americans (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston) in a high-stakes basketball shoot-out; he takes a bullet for Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) in the Frenchman’s Art Deco night club; he negotiates with the Newark Syndicate’s hipster representative, Marty (Jeffrey Wright), with the aid of deadly force. Closer to home, he hopes to marry a rich second cousin, Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), and seeks the support of an estranged half brother, called Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch).

This last relationship becomes particularly fraught. Zsa-zsa has outlived all three of his wives, including Liesl’s mother, and Liesl has heard rumors that he killed her, or had her killed. When she confronts him, he pins the blame on Nubar, and Liesl demands that her uncle be punished. (Threapleton, in her first major feature-film role, has a striking presence, both quietly fierce and effortlessly wry.) Thus the movie’s financial and martial machinations take place within a more elemental family drama: in order to win his daughter’s allegiance and affection, Zsa-zsa must pursue a mock-Shakespearean plot of fratricidal revenge. “The Phoenician Scheme” is Anderson’s most sentimental movie—the story of a merciless man so desperate for his devout daughter’s love that he’s willing to kill for it.

As with all Anderson’s films, the design of “The Phoenician Scheme” is jubilantly exquisite. Anderson’s aesthetic is one of the miracles and mysteries of the modern cinema, and “The Phoenician Scheme” is filled with some of the most eye-catching baubles and gizmos of his career, such as two corncob pipes, one plain and one fancy, that Liesl smokes; a blood-transfusion unit that works by squeeze bulb; and shoeboxes in which Zsa-zsa keeps his key documents. (Anderson’s late father-in-law, a businessman named Fouad Malouf, used shoeboxes in this way, and the film is dedicated to him.) Meticulously imagined and crafted objects are central to Anderson’s world, and they express more than taste and delight. He showcases them like madeleines of many flavors, summoning personal memories and associations along with broader cultural memories and archetypes.

The stylistic thrills of “The Phoenician Scheme” are inseparable from its turbulent, violent physical action, and it is here that the film proves most surprising and most original: its linear narrative lays bare Anderson’s cinephile obsessions. There’s something Hitchcockian about Anderson—albeit in reverse. Hitchcock’s movies stylize violence; Anderson makes style violent. In film after film, his onscreen ideal of beauty embodies the spirit of opposition and revolt. Paul Valéry said that taste is formed of a thousand distastes, and Anderson’s aesthetic is a furious affirmation fuelled by those many implicit repudiations. The most powerful exemplar of rebellion in Anderson’s œuvre is his vision of Zsa-zsa against the world.

Zsa-zsa has a curated aesthetic of his own. He’s an art collector and a student of antiquity who always has his nose in a book. His staff includes, as a paid companion and tutor, an entomologist named Bjorn (played by Michael Cera, using one of the most outrageous accents this side of Walter Matthau), who travels with caged insects and is entrusted with a case containing all Zsa-zsa’s cash. Zsa-zsa pursues pleasure and faces danger with the same nonchalance, but as his wounds accumulate he can no longer ignore them. With each near-death experience, he has another vision of the afterlife (including ones in which Bill Murray plays God, or vice versa), and these visions arouse fear and something like conscience. When Zsa-zsa’s spirit of opposition gets this cautionary reboot, it turns him against himself and the milieu in which he prospers.

The film cites a number of real-life models for Zsa-zsa; in addition to Anderson’s late father-in-law, there’s Calouste Gulbenkian, the Ottoman Armenian industrialist who pioneered the oil business in the Middle East, and whose nickname, Mr. Five Per Cent, is shared by Zsa-zsa. But the crucial model is a cinematic one, from Orson Welles’s 1955 film “Mr. Arkadin,” in which Welles plays a tycoon determined to keep his grown daughter from finding out that he got his start in criminal enterprises. Anderson stands the original on its head: grooming Liesl as a successor, Zsa-zsa introduces her to a world where cunning and force hold sway. To his daughter, this international man of mystery is utterly transparent. Notably, it’s Nubar, with his full, square beard and upswept hair and eyebrows, who physically resembles Welles’s Arkadin, and this resemblance provides a clue to the story that Anderson is telling about family and identity, about truth and falsehood, about who’s awaiting his comeuppance and who’s on the road to redemption.

Anderson’s cinematic allusions in “The Phoenician Scheme” make sharp intertextual points. When Zsa-zsa proudly raises the curtain on an enormous, electrified, mechanical diorama of his scheme’s many components, the display mimics a scene in Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, “The Rules of the Game,” in which a rich aristocrat unveils a room-size electrical music box. Renoir’s film dramatized the end of an era (of high-society frivolities, as war loomed), and so does Anderson’s; namely, the end of the age of buccaneer industrialism. The bureaucrats Zsa-zsa reviles may well take over, but he may still have the satisfaction of victory on his own terms. In evoking Renoir and Welles, Anderson, born in 1969, also evokes the mores of their times, via a style that couldn’t have existed then. He looks back to a harder world of blood poetry and clangorous capitalism, extracting and distilling its virtues without nostalgia and with shuddering reminders of its vices. Anderson’s own intensely self-aware art represents, albeit with an awareness of loss, a sense of progress. ♦