‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Is A Wes Anderson Movie About A Reckless Rich Guy Making Big Beautiful Deals

Wes Anderson is just about the last prestige filmmaker anyone would expect to rip anything from the headlines, at least not headlines sourced from still-extant publications. Like so many of the best American directors, he’s gone years without making a movie set in the recognizable here and now, something he last did with 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. (Granted, 2018’s Isle of Dogs was set in a stop-motion dystopian future.) In fact, his new film The Phoenician Scheme takes place even deeper into the past than usual—precisely midcentury, in 1950. (Only The Grand Budapest Hotel reaches further back.) That said, The Phoenician Scheme also follows a wealthy man who lives in ridiculous opulence, may actually be cash-poor, operates with the reckless bravado and self-interest of a self-styled dealmaker, and uses frivolous lawsuits as a major weapon to vanquish his enemies. He spends much of the movie pursuing a labyrinthine, interconnected development project in the fictionalized Middle Eastern country of Phoenicia that entails cajoling various other parties into paying more money following a series of vengeful tariff increases.

Anderson has said that he did not really write this movie thinking of Donald Trump, and I believe him. The film is dedicated to his late father-in-law, who apparently inspired the central character, a detail that makes sense; Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is selfish and careless, but he is drawn with affection. He’s a caricature, but not a grotesque, nor a vulgarian, nor an idiot. He’s the kind of industrialist figure someone like Trump might mindlessly imitate, oblivious (or aspiring) to the emptiness at the center of his role model’s endless wheeling and dealing. Yet whether or not Trump ever entered Anderson’s mind during the writing or filmmaking process—which took place during the Biden years—it’s hard to avoid how long this man has been the center of national attention, seeping into our consciousness.

Like Trump, Zsa Zsa doesn’t particularly articulate the purpose or full dimension of this supposed life’s-work project, which is thrown into potential disaster by a sudden increase in the price of bolts. The important thing about Zsa Zsa’s scheme is that it is vast and it is his, not unlike the director’s intricately-designed parallel worlds, and the movie spends a compressed period of time with Zsa Zsa and his estranged only daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) as he attempts to set this project right for his potential heir. He speaks of a massive work that will resonate (and generate income for) a century and a half, or more, if everyone will just get out of the way and surrender to his whims. Welcome to Wes Anderson’s Infrastructure Week.

Despite these strange parallels to our world, The Phoenician Scheme will strike some as just another Wes Anderson picture, as so many of his pictures do for a certain segment of the audience. We have again a selfish, absent, and unaffectionate father with big projects beyond his children (in the style of Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, and the fantastic Mr. Fox), a child whose exact parentage raises certain questions (like Margot Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou’s maybe-son Ned Plimpton), unruly supporting children shooting arrows (like in Moonrise Kingdom), and a daisy chain of Anderson regulars in walk-on roles as various eccentrics (like in most of his recent films, especially Asteroid City), among other signatures. But as recognizable as his work remains, Anderson also experiments compulsively within that framework. Here there are striking overhead shots, occasional jump cuts, a couple of whirling POV shots when characters attack each other with particular brio, and black-and-white sequences where Zsa Zsa has dreamlike visions of an afterlife, fueling his desire to pass his projects off to Liesl before one of many assassination attempts succeeds.

Though the afterlife sequences feature Anderson regulars dressed in outlandish costumes—Bill Murray plays God, naturally—they’re not really comic bits, instead speaking to the ticking clock affixed to this amoral man’s life. Zsa Zsa is not a spiritual man; Liesl has been preparing to become a nun, and it’s a calling from which Zsa Zsa seeks to retrieve her, at one point replacing her genuine rosary with a gaudy “secular” version. Clearly there’s only room for one godlike overseer here. Yet we sense that Zsa Zsa’s tendencies toward the vainglorious, while not quite touched with religious grace nor an artist’s sensibility, are maybe his version of the spiritual—building temples to himself. The black-and-white glimpses of the beyond shake him up, however subtly, because they don’t conform to his self-image. As with so many Anderson protagonists, he’s getting a glimpse of things beyond his control. Increasingly this involves some higher cosmic order that they can’t quite get their arms around.