Wes Anderson's films are like intricately crafted dollhouses. The good ones feel human and alive, like a dollhouse a little girl has filled with her imagination. The bad ones are like a dollhouse on display in an upmarket shop window, existing to be admired rather than enjoyed. The Phoenician Scheme belongs to the latter category. It's not quite as visually meticulous as we've become accustomed to from Anderson, but it still looks better than 90% of the movies that will grace cinema screens this year. Yet while it's easy to admire the upholstery and carpentry of its sets, its story is almost impenetrably uninteresting, as are most of its characters.
Taking place in 1956 in a series of fictional Balkan and Middle Eastern nations, the film is centred on Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), an unscrupulous oligarch who has survived numerous assassination attempts, one of which opens the film. Korda's latest dastardly plot involves creating a famine in the nation of Phoenicia in order to take over its economy. Hoping she will some day inherit the family business, Korda takes his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun who disapproves of his tactics, along on a series of business negotiations, accompanied by Norwegian tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera).
The movie has an episodic structure, with Korda encountering a variety of quirky figures. He plays a game of basketball with Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston and Riz Ahmed. He finds himself in an attack on a nightclub by rebels headed by Richard Ayoade. He engages in a Jedi-like battle with his (more) evil brother, played by benedict Cumberbatch sporting ridiculously large eyebrows. Dream sequences of the afterlife Korda has resolutely avoided feature a bearded Bill Murray as God and Willem Dafoe as God knows what.
Anderson's previous feature, Asteroid City, was so loaded with star power that I began to wonder if Anderson was being bullied into making movies by Hollywood celebs who see him as an easy way to keep themselves in cinephile credit. The likes of Scarlett Johansson can spend two days on an Anderson set, allowing her to claim she's still doing it for the love of cinema while spending six months prancing about in front of a green screen in a warehouse outside Budapest. The Phoenician Scheme is similarly overloaded with stars, most of whom barely get more than two lines (I couldn't tell you what purpose Johansson's character serves here). Everyone on screen seems to be enjoying themselves; the audience, not so much.
It can be difficult to gauge the quality of a performance in a Wes Anderson movie because his players are essentially human marionettes, fleshy versions of Gerry Anderson's string puppets. But in Cera's Bjorn we have one of the standout turns of the Anderson catalogue, up there with Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Cera appears to be channelling the late legendary Swedish football coach Sven Goran Eriksson with the most over the top approximation of a Nordic accent since the Muppets' Swedish Chef. He enlivens every scene he's in, and even when he's in the background you find yourself drawn to Cera rather than the action in the foreground. Sounding distractingly like her mother, Kate Winslet, Threapleton is also very good in her first major role, but as she's playing a very deadpan Anderson archetype we'll have to see her work for a more conventional filmmaker before judgement can be passed on this latest nepo baby.
The trouble with Anderson is that while he's a consummate visual stylist, he's not much of a visual storyteller. His pictures are beautiful, but he too often relies on words to tell his stories. His films tend to be weighed down by expository dialogue and voiceovers, and as the images are so distractingly gorgeous, we usually find ourselves tuning out the dialogue. That's exactly what happened to me early on while watching The Phoenician Scheme; I was so invested in looking at the movie that I forgot to listen to it, and thus it was a struggle to get my head around much of the plot. By the end I was mentally exhausted.
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Starring: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson
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