Review: 'The Phoenician Scheme' adds some melancholy, and Benicio Del Toro's charm, to Wes Anderson's patented whimsy
At their best, the movies of director Wes Anderson are like Russian nesting dolls, where one narrative sits inside another and another — like with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or his Roald Dahl shorts.
Anderson’s latest, the sublime and slightly melancholy “The Phoenician Scheme,” is more like a train set, a string of interlocking mini-narratives lined up like boxcars, each adding nuance to what went before. The locomotive for this particular train, the one who powers it all, is actor Benicio Del Toro.
Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, an industrialist and arms dealer, circa 1950, who we meet as he is in the midst of his sixth plane crash — which, like the others, was an assassination attempt. Violence is an old companion to Korda, who casually offers hand grenades to his guests like they were hand towels.
Knowing his enemies won’t stop coming at him, Korda decides he needs to groom his heir. He passes over his nine sons, who live in his sprawling mansion and have a talent for violence, and chooses his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Liesl has no interest in her father’s fortune, as she is a novice working towards a life as a nun.
Korda enlists Liesl — as well as Bjørn (Michael Cera), a tutor who becomes an assistant — to finish his latest and greatest business scheme, overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia. (If you know Phoenicia is a region in what’s now Lebanon and Syria that hasn’t existed since shortly before the birth of Christ, congratulations. You’re smart, and this information will not help at all while watching this movie.)
There are multiple parts to this scheme, and each part forms an episode in Anderson’s script (he shares story credit with Roman Coppola, a frequent collaborator). Each part involves rewriting some previous deal with one of his investors, to cover a “gap” in his funding. And each trading partner has reason to be suspicious or vengeful toward Korda.
The trading partners and the other characters Korda encounters are, true to Anderson’s style, played by an array of famous faces, a list that includes Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright and Scarlett Johansson. Korda also is dealing with Excalibur (Rupert Friend), a government agent on orders to disrupt Korda’s scheme, and his half-brother Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has some schemes of his own.
Korda is also contemplating mortality — multiple assassination attempts will do that — and has moments where he imagines the afterlife. Heaven is populated with such folks as Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham and, in an amazing instance of typecasting, Bill Murray as God.
Del Toro has worked with Anderson before, on “The French Dispatch,” and seems to run on the same wavelength, capturing both Anderson’s offbeat humor and his wistful worldview. In admiring Del Toro’s top-tier performance, though, don’t neglect giving praise to young Threapleton, who keys in on Anderson’s deadpan dialogue style as if it’s her first language. (If Threapleton looks like someone you’ve seen before, ht helps to know that she’s the daughter of Kate Winslet, who came close to working with Anderson on “The French Dispatch,” and should try again to make that connection happen.)
“The Phoenician Scheme” is a lot to take in, as Anderson’s dense plotting and rapid-fire dialogue deliver a lot of information all at once. Best to let it wash over you, and get caught up in the whimsical absurdity and humane undertone that Anderson brings to his films.
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‘The Phoenician Scheme’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, some sexual material, nude images, and smoking throughout. Running time: 101 minutes.