Wes Anderson (2025)
I decided to take a break from Wes Anderson after The French Dispatch (2021); and gave Asteroid City (2023) and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024) a miss. The sabbatical is over and nothing much has changed. The Phoenician Scheme is all dressed up (itself) with nowhere to go.
The story, set around 1950, revolves around an arms-dealing industrialist, Anatole ‘Zsa-Zsa’ Korda (Benicio del Toro), and his project to transform the infrastructure of Phoenicia. (Roman Coppola worked with Anderson on the script.) His various enemies keep trying to kill him but Korda, though graphically injured each time, is repeatedly death-defying. Needing to close a huge funding gap to advance his grand Phoenician designs, he visits a succession of dubious, mega-rich, international contacts. There’s no shortage of incident in the story, which invites comparison with The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): this latest effort only underlines the loss of dynamism in Anderson’s filmmaking in the last ten years. The new film’s episodic structure naturally calls to mind The French Dispatch: the best thing about this structure in The Phoenician Scheme is that summary text on screen regularly updates the list of who Korda has so far approached for money and with what result. This device is encouraging for viewers longing for the film to end (only two left to go now, only one left …)
Alexandre Desplat’s roguish score shares the soundtrack with snatches of music by, among others, Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky, whose ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ features towards the end. Then, as the end titles begin, there are miniature images of famous works of art – like, yes, pictures at an exhibition! The closing credits are noteworthy, though – confirmation that The Phoenician Scheme involved a cast of hundreds and a crew of thousands: as always in a Wes Anderson film, you can’t ignore how much ingenuity has gone into the fanatically detailed visuals. You understand, too, why all sorts of design and technical professionals surely love working with Anderson (as the son of friends of mine once did – though that was on Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), of which everyone involved had reason to be proud). Maybe the people in front of the camera also had a good time on The Phoenician Scheme – it must have been more fun than watching the film is – yet I’ve come to hate how Anderson squanders acting talent.
Some cinemagoers prefer their film stars to be essentially constant presences/character types; others (like me) want to see the high-class actors among them play a wide range of different people. Wes Anderson’s approach to casting defeats both perspectives. He fills the screen with big-name, recognisable performers; rather than casting against type, he then tries to suppress their individuality. The tendency has become more pronounced in recent years – again, compare this film with The Grand Budapest Hotel (his second-best work after Fantastic Mr Fox, where, of course, there’s not a human being in sight). Anderson’s actors now conform to a vocal house style: high-speed, often deadpan delivery of the abundant, clever-clever dialogue, never mind the sometimes chaotic, explosive goings-on around them. The main cast of The Phoenician Scheme mostly comprises actors he’s used before. These include, as well as Benicio del Toro, F Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray and Jeffrey Wright. But there are a few Anderson debutants in evidence too: Riz Ahmed, Michael Cera, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alex Jennings, Jason Watkins – and Mia Threapleton.
It says a lot about Anderson’s reliance on A-listers that you rarely hear of a new young actor breaking through in one of his films. On the face of it, this latest one might seem a refreshing exception to the rule. Mia Threapleton has the film’s largest role after Benicio del Toro’s – she plays Zsa-Zsa Korda’s only daughter Liesl, a nun. Just twenty-four, Threapleton is appearing here in only her second leading role in cinema (the first was in Shadows (2020), a little-seen thriller) but she’s not exactly an unknown: her mother is Kate Winslet and the pair co-starred in the award-winning 2022 television drama I Am Ruth. Threapleton gives a capable performance in The Phoenician Scheme: that means holding her own with much more experienced actors by mastering the art of speaking in a metronomic monotone.
The question of how good or otherwise an actor is in a Wes Anderson film, has become nearly irrelevant. We usually already know the people concerned are expert performers; when they’re in an Anderson cast we just assume they’re limiting themselves, as required. This is damning Benicio del Toro with faint praise but I did get the feeling that The Phoenician Scheme would have been even worse with a different lead actor – someone with less natural presence than del Toro, someone trying more self-consciously than he does to get on the Anderson wavelength. Someone like Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, whose effortful performance here is embarrassing. On the sort-of plus side, there’s Jeffrey Wright, as a motormouth investor, who arrives in the film with notable verve, and Jason Watkins, as a notary, who delivers one of its few enjoyable moments, resoundingly stamping documents. And Alex Jennings’ physical precision as Broadcloth, Korda’s butler, is remarkable – a person turning into a quasi-cartoon figure. Laughing at a Wes Anderson line is nowadays a remote possibility. I can’t help thinking that it may have helped Jennings and Watkins that they have next to nothing to say in The Phoenician Scheme.
27 May 2025
