Wes Anderson gets weird and hilarious in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’
An arms dealer, a novitiate, and God walk into a Wes Anderson movie — and it’s one of his funniest yet
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I’m tired of apologizing for my love of the films of Wes Anderson. Here’s my hard line: I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t like Anderson’s movies. The combination of quirk, whimsy, intricate sets, obsessive symmetry, bright color palette, and hyper-specific aesthetic isn’t for everyone, nor should it be. But where I do take issue is with people who say that all of his movies are the same. They’re not. Not even close. Do they have a similar vibe? Absolutely. But the content of his films, while having some similar touchstones, has as much thematic depth as any other auteur currently working.
A few years ago I rewatched his filmography and tried to spotlight just a few of the differences in his work. Here’s a brief look at his range:
Bottle Rocket (1996) is the outlier because it doesn't carry most of Anderson's trademark idiosyncrasies, but still effortlessly combines a West Texas crime comedy with the iconoclastic existentialism of the French new wave.
Rushmore (1998) To be young, brilliant and deeply misunderstood by all around you is one of Anderson's favorite themes, but Max Fischer isn't just a representation of Anderson's loneliness, but a synecdoche for outcasts everywhere.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Unpacking the unrealized expectations we have in life, whether it's our disappointment in a father, our acceptance of the tenacity of loss or learning that waves of melancholy can be ridden forever.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Starring a fearlessly unsympathetic Bill Murray, this was the first film of Anderson's career to fail critically, but in re-evaluation is seen as the result of his unchecked idiosyncrasies bleeding into influences like Cousteau and Orson Welles.
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Three brothers carrying their literal and metaphorical baggage across India in a quixotic search for absentee love, this film sees Anderson dialing his melancholy up to 100, while also opening himself up existentially to the unknown adventures and failures we become mired in throughout life.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) Perfectly incorporates Anderson's style into the world of Roald Dahl, while marrying quirk and handmade humanity into something that feels like the cinematic equivalent of your favorite vinyl record.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012) Captures childhood love with nostalgia and tenderness, while also achingly exploring the unlimited limitations of youth.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) Anderson starts deconstructing the actual art and structure of storytelling as he builds a Russian nesting doll of a plot with a woman in the modern day reading a book written in 1985 about a story the author was told on vacation in 1968 about the Grand Budapest Hotel in 1932.
Isle of Dogs (2018) The one I've gone back to the least because this doesn’t marry Anderson's astonishingly bleak story to his influences as invisibly as he normally does. This is Anderson at his most bitter, which I'm not sure I appreciate as much as I should.
The French Dispatch (2021) Anderson's most whimsical film is also his first anthology, with stories ranging from the hauntingly moribund to the deepest appreciation of the written word he has ever expressed.
Asteroid City (2023) takes the artificiality of the stage and presses heartbreak, loss, loneliness, fear, and existential dread into its margins, creating another meta-textual comedy soaked in the sadness of everyday life.
To say that Anderson repeats himself over and over again is lazy and misses the forest for the perfectly manicured tiny forest inside the larger one. If Anderson is repeating himself, so did Godard. So did Jackson Pollock. So did Picasso. The artifice of his flawlessly constructed symmetric sets is belied by the fact that all the emotions present in the characters are messy and chaotic.
Anderson’s new film, The Phoenician Scheme, is filled with a lot of his same obsessions: a distant parental figure, inept criminals, irrational romanticism, self-deluded existential depression, and spiritual constipation in people starving for God. In no world will The Phoenician Scheme convert disgruntled old fans or bring new ones into the Anderson cinematic universe, but it’s probably his funniest film since The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Plus, with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel stepping in for longtime Anderson collaborator Robert Yeoman, it has a texture unlike any we’ve seen from him before. This is Anderson with a slight dash of grit and grime.
The plot doesn’t matter in the same way the mystery of The Big Lebowski is superfluous to watching the dude accidentally stumble through a film noir. The always wonderful Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-Zsa Korda, an arms dealer/business tycoon attempting to change the world through an impossible-for-me-to-describe-in-two-sentences scheme. He teams with many disreputable men and women, including his estranged daughter, a Catholic novitiate played by the instant movie star Mia Threapleton, a Norwegian entomologist (a perfect Michael Cera), a Phoenician crown prince, French gangsters, revolutionaries and even God (played by Bill Murray, obviously).
While the story is fun and ridiculous in equal measure, the inner lives of these characters are the real joy here. That’s the epiphany I’ve had while watching Anderson lately. The artifice of his aesthetic and design doesn’t just exist to showcase his peculiar peccadillos, but instead acts as a counter-balance to the very real human emotion. When we see del Toro in spiritual pain, it hits harder when surrounded by an artificiality already inherent in movies. This is Anderson very intelligently saying that all external stimuli can feel like set dressing compared to whatever turmoil is churning beneath the surface.
No one is required to like the movies of Wes Anderson, but to say he’s making the same movie over and over is actively not engaging with the work itself on the level it deserves. Anderson is a genius, and whether or not one appreciates his highly mannered and idiosyncratic style, it is mercifully subjective. And his singular vision is one that I guarantee will be studied a hundred years from now alongside Jacques Tati, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. I’m calling it now.
Grade: A-
